The art of astronomy
Zoltan Levay makes distant galaxies beautiful
ICON To celebrate the Hubble telescope’s 25th anniversary, Zoltan Levay and other astronomers reimaged the famous Pillars of Creation.
Hubble Heritage Team/Hubble/NASA, ESA
An astronomer by training but a photographer at heart, Zoltan Levay creates images of the cosmos with one of humankind’s most advanced optical instruments: the Hubble Space Telescope. Producing photos with the telescope, he says, is not that different from shooting mountains and rivers in national parks. “We’re just shooting landscapes of the universe instead,” he says.
Levay, 62, heads Hubble’s imaging group and is part of the Hubble Heritage Team, which works to share the telescope’s images with the public. Born in Pakistan, Levay moved with his parents to the United States in 1956. In high school, he built his own telescope to take pictures of planets and stars. He studied astronomy and astrophysics,
