About the artist

 My name is Rick Costello and I call the state of 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 and Buzz Aldrin became the first men 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.” How great is that I thought.  That is arguably the greatest achievment our species has ever made. We actually left our planet Earth and landed men on the moon, 239,000 miles away.  Amazing and I’m surprised it has not been repeated since. 

Since that time, as an amateur, I have spent my life trying to understand this universe.  What we have learned about the evolution of the universe in the last 90 years is just amazing and I can’t wait to find what we discover in the future.

  When I was 15 years old, I bought my first telescope, an old used 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 and morning many years ago, when I looked at Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune rise and cross the sky throughout the night.  It was the first time, I visualized the structure of our solar system.  I saw the planets cross the sky, one at a time, following the same path acroos the sky. I could see how the planets circled the Sun on a flat plane. Very unforgettable.

For the past 15 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.

For the past 15 years, I have been presenting telescope viewing shows for different groups and private parties as well as lectures at schools and libraries in the Connecticut area.  One of my goals is to let as many people as I can, look through my telescopes . The vast majority of those who look, and it does not matter their ages, are looking through a telescope for the first time and have never seen at the clouds of Jupiter, or a cresent Venus, or another galaxy, or even the rings of Saturn.  No one ever forgets their first look at the rings of Saturn.  Through the years of doing these telescope viewing shows, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who wasn’t amazed at seeing any of those objects through the telescope. Seeing them makes them real instead of just a picture in a book. They are real.

I also work in the planetarium at The Children’s Museum on Troutbrook Dr. in West Hartford Connecticut.  The planetarium there is a top notch 40 foot dome and is amazing at showing the galaxy and universe.  The Children’s Museum is a great place for kids to have fun and learn with exhibits, animals, movies and enough activites to last a weekend and I recommend it.  Your kids will have a blast.

I started painting scenes of the galaxy about a dozen years ago after years of painting and other art forms.  For years, I had pictured in my head these scenes that I paint. I could picture the Earth and the moon in space, among the hundreds of billion other stars that make up our Milky Way Galaxy and one day I bagan to put it on canvas and I found I couldn’t stop. My first painting, painting # 1, took me two and a half years to complete, working 8-20 hours a day on it, including two months where I stopped working on it because I couldn’t look at it. Every star is put on one at a time and I would sleep at night and all I would see in  my dreams were stars.   It was close to maddening.  I have no idea on the actual number of stars in that painting but I’m sure there’s more than half a million, if not many more. I’m sure there are more stars in that painting than anyone in the history of mankind has ever painted in a scene. After doing it, I can understand why no one else has painted that many stars.                                 

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