About the artist

 My name is Rick Costello and I call Manchester, Connecticut home. I began my interest in astronomy in 1969 at the age of nine when with the rest of the world, I watched as Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the Moon.  I remember going outside the next day, in the morning I believe, and looking at the Moon and thinking to myself, “ there are two guys walking on the Moon right now and there is another guy circling the moon in a ship.”  I thought that was the greatest thing.  From there on, as a hobby, I began reading everything I could find on our universe and that continues to this day.  The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.

  After our landing on the Moon, I began reading everything I could find on astronomy and I continue to do so today. I wish I knew how many books on the subject I have read for the last 37 years, in the high hundreds at least I am sure.  I like to read and though I try reading fiction, I just can’t draw myself into fiction and the make-believe world.  Give me a book on facts and something real and I won’t be able to put it down.

  When I was 15 years old, I bought my first telescope, an old 4 inch reflector telescope that worked great. I spent many nights from Sundown till Sun-up and I learned a lot with that scope.   I still remember the night I saw all of the planets except Mercury and Pluto (oops, that right,it’s not a planet any more) .  That was the first time I ever realized the structure of our solar system.  All night I watched the other planets move across the sky, one at a time, following the same path across the night sky. I could actually visualize all the planets on the same plane around the Sun. I could for the first time see the shape of our solar system.  It was a night I will never forget. 

  For the past ten or so years, I have had a 16 inch reflector telescope that has just opened up the Universe to me and I still find myself outside late at night looking up at the night sky every chance I get.

  About 10 years ago, after years of learning astronomy, I realized that with everything I had learned and knew about our Universe, I couldn’t have a serious conversation about astronomy with any of my friends or people that I met because for the most part, the majority of people haven’t heard about what we are learning and what we know about the Universe in the last few years. Especially the last 40 years, our knowledge of the Universe has grown enormously. Many “theories” of the past have been proven as facts with the advent of new technologies in the space sciences.  Although we are far from knowing everything, we are certainly on the right path to understanding this whole thing that we are a part of.

  At that time, I decided that in my small way, I was going to do what I could to teach and show as many people as I could the wonders of our galaxy and Universe. I began by putting on telescope viewing nights at different schools around Connecticut for the students and their families and other times by just setting the telescope up somewhere and showing the night sky to anyone who walked up. For the schools shows, I could easily get over a hundred people looking through the scope each night and if I just set it up somewhere I could get a few people, to a lot more than I thought were going to show up. The more the better. I also do private party shows and recently began helping the Audubon Society in Connecticut with their night viewing nights.

  One of the reasons I do these shows is that at most of the shows, for most , no matter if their 8 years old or 80, they are looking through a telescope for the first time ever. Most people will go through their whole lives and never ever see the rings of Saturn, or Jupiter, or another galaxy or even the moon through a telescope. I hope to change that for a few people.  During my shows from everyone all night, I hear ooh’s and ahh’s and wow!  Everyone goes away knowing that Saturn is not just a picture in a book or magazine, it’s real and they know it because they just saw it. 

  I have been averaging around 600 people a year looking through my telescopes and I’m hoping that in the coming years with the sale of my paintings I will be able see that number grow. 

  My paintings are an extension of my telescope. They are another way for me to show others our place within the Milky Way galaxy. In each painting I try to show the galaxy as it really would look if we could be out in space beyond the Earth and Moon and see all the stars, the hundreds of billions of stars that are in our galaxy.  Each painting is a long process if not a hypnotizing process of putting every star on the canvas one at a time and where it should be located within the galaxy. I want an astronomer to look at the paintings and for her/him to say, “Hey, that’s our galaxy.”  The larger stars are the constellation stars and the stars get smaller and smaller the further they get from us and the closer they get to the center of the galaxy.  The pictures on your computer can’t give total justice to these paintings. To see one in person is when you really see the depth, beauty and complexity of our Milky Way Galaxy.

  This is a great Universe that we are a part of and one that we are capable of understanding, if we only look.   

Look up,                                                                                                                             Rick Costello