This image is from the Hubble Space Telescope and is one of a larger series. This image has been digitally enhanced and has featured many times in NASA's Picture of the Day series; it is a well-known and widely-reproduced image.

 

 

 

 

 

Signifier	Signified
	Uncoded	Coded
stars
clouds	vague shapes	faces, eyes, people, birds
natural objects		beauty religious connotation
dark pillar-like structure (plume)	smoke-like column	violence
colour	lightness and darkness
foreground
background
compostion
means of production
scientific gaze	scientific interpretation	violence distance, vast scale
aesthetic gaze	aesthetic interpretation	beauty and violence

There is no linguistic message encoded in this image - as there is no text: it is therefore a pure image.The image has a title and scientific explanation, but these are extranneous to the image. The message encoded in this image is a visual one - the signs are visual rather than linguistic. (Polysemic connotation rather than semiotic?)

The bottom of the image is dark - the top is lighter. A dark plume-like structure is shown against a background of bright dots and nebulous clouds; the bright dots are stars; the nebulous clouds are evaoprating clouds of hydrogen and interstellar dust. A dark smoke-like column extends in the foreground from the base to the top of the image where it dissapates into a lighter background.

The form of the clouds 'suggest' images. The title of this image - The Eagle Has Risen: Stellar Spire in the Eagle Nebula - anchors the meaning of this photograph; it has been taken by the suggestion of the form of an eagle that can be seen in the clouds in the upper centre. Other images suggest themselves, just like seeing images in clouds passing across the sky.

There is no linguistic message, but the image offers a coded iconic message and a non-coded iconic message. The literal image is denoted by the scientific image of stars and clouds; the symbolic image is connoted by the aesthetic image, the meanings that we associate with our view of the image and our interpretation of the shapes formed by the stars and clouds.

There are no man-made objects in this image, everything is natural. This natural randomness presents a polyscopic anamorphosis that reveals different objects when the image is viewed from different angles. Paradocially, although presenting a natural image, it is produced digitally by a computer program and then enhanced by human means using further digital technology. Distribution of the image through digital means - to a wider audience than the intended scientific community - allows the image to be viewed by anyone with internet access, at various sizes and resolutions.

The effect of the image is enabled by the technology used in its production. Not only was the image selected from many different sequences of photographs, the whole image is composed of a framework of many different shots. The scientific explanation of this image provides the discursive framework to decode the message. The images were chosen for their aesthetic values as much as their scientific ones.

The images is intended to communicate an innocent, scientfic and transparent message. This message can be distorted by a llack of equivalence between the intented meaning of the published message and the perceived reading of that message in the communicative process.

Although this is a scientific image, it is not intended for viewing exclusively by scientists. The 'owners', NASA, have made this image availble to all to see, not just the scientific community. However, an ideological view might have the interpretation that:. although the image is produced for academic and scientific purposes, there is a dichotomy of male, military, capitalist imperialism and extravegance in the millions of dollars it has cost to produce this image for mass consumption.

With selective perception - many meanings can be interpreted . . . with a scientific perception the viewer decodes the data in the intended understanding - inside the dominant code, a dominant-hegemonic position. The coded (metacode) content of the message is independent of the dominant code and enables transparency and credibility due to the exacting criteria and transformational operations of production.

Questions raised:
Does this present a transparent, innocent view of the world? Is this an extension of the 'touist gaze' part of the "impartial survey of all creation" as advocated by Adler in Rose, Researching Visual Methodologies, 2001: 7

What this image does not show directly: - commercialism, milittarism, capitalism, colonialsim, male supremecy, femininity, patriarchy. . . class, gender, race, sexuality none of these things are present in the image, but ideological theorists might interpret all manner of meaning into this picture of stars and clouds.

Further information might be gained through: compositional intpretation, content analysis, semiology, psychoanalysis, discourse analysis or audience studies.