SHORTLY after returning from a 13-day mission on the shuttle Discovery, Col. Ronald J. Garan Jr., a NASA astronaut and Air Force pilot, visited Yonkers, his hometown. In a ceremony at the Hudson River Museum on July 14, he and Mayor Philip A. Amicone exchanged gifts. The mayor presented Colonel Garan with the key to the city, and Colonel Garan (Roosevelt High School, class of 1979) presented Mr. Amicone with items from Yonkers, including school mementos, that he had taken into space.
While touring the museum’s current exhibition, “Space Is the Place,” Colonel Garan took special interest in paintings by Lia Halloran that show astronautlike figures, and an audio installation, “Indecision on the Moon,” by Nina Katchadourian, that replays Neil A. Armstrong’s lunar landing, but none of his famous words. Speaking by phone from Houston, Colonel Garan, 46, noted that his mother, Linda Relis, is a wildlife artist in Florida whose naturalistic oil paintings hang in the State House. For that reason, he said, he is more accustomed to “technically accurate” than conceptual art. On the other hand, he said, referring to the Yonkers show, “You can’t help but be impressed with some of the creativity.”
There were sights in outer space, though, that the most accomplished painter might have trouble depicting, he said; even NASA photographs, however stunning, fall short. (During their mission the Discovery crew members took 10,000 photographs that can be seen on NASA’s Web site: www.nasa.gov.)
“We have a sunrise or sunset every 45 minutes,” he said, noting that the shuttle was traveling 220 miles above the earth at 17,000 miles per hour. “Off to the left, those people are asleep. To the right, they’re awake and at work. The colors, the transitions, to see it change from pitch black to bright sun, to see the dim bluish glow, then oranges and reds — it would be very difficult to capture that in any medium.”
He described lightning storms hundreds of miles long, shooting stars, the southern polar lights and low-light sights that “you can’t capture photographically.”
It was “completely surrealistic,” he said, to be looping around the International Space Station with the Andes Mountains, the west coast of Africa and Shanghai spinning by in the background.
Colonel Garan was part of a team that installed the main module of a Japanese laboratory known as Kibo, or Hope, on the space station. Having made three spacewalks totaling nearly 21 hours during the mission, he said he was awestruck by the enormousness of the space station (“bigger than a football field”) and the human and political achievement it represented. He was also keenly aware of Earth’s fragility as he looked down on “the planet hanging in the blackness of space.”
“You see how our atmosphere is paper thin, a little sliver — all that separates us from the blackness and harshness of space,” he said. “We’ve been given this oasis.”