Space artist Joy Day, 41, acknowledged that some people may not be as interested in buying space art now that Hubble and other missions have made "the real thing" more available.
But she believes that Hubble has also boosted — and liberated — the genre.
At an exhibit last month in Los Angeles, where some pieces of space art fetched a couple of thousand dollars, Day pointed to an oil painting she did with her partner, B.E. Johnson, of a glowing red planet and bright brown and white moons backlit by a patchy sienna galactic cloud.
"We didn't know we could paint the galaxy mottled like this," she said. "Before, scientists said it had to be dark…. Hubble images have a billion colors. Whoo!"
Why stop at pretty colors?
"I didn't want to paint the Orion Nebula the way it looks," said Bettina Forget, 40, a Montreal-based artist. "You can just order that on the Hubble website."
Forget, who was trained at art schools in London, Singapore and Perth, Australia, counts abstract expressionists, such as Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, as inspirations. Take her diptych of Io and Europa, "Fire and Ice."
For Io, she poured layers of acrylic gel onto the canvas to simulate lava flows. She wrote along the curves of the flows in Sütterlin, an old German handwriting, describing Io's heat and sulfur-covered surface.
With Europa, she carved gashes into a blanket of acrylic gel to capture the ice cracks on the moon's surface. She used Sütterlin again, but obscured the words with a thin layer of white to make the words appear to be frozen.
Unfortunately for rock-and-ballers, it's tough making a living by reinterpreting what a camera has already seen.
But there are still many corners of the universe that can't be seen with a camera.
"Black holes and neutron stars are so small, even with the best telescopes we have, they won't look like much at all," said Astronomy magazine's Talcott. "We have to go to space art to see that."
Last year, a team of astronomers, including Geoffrey Marcy of UC Berkeley, made a stunning discovery — a nearly Earth-size planet orbiting the star Gliese 876, about 15 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius.
No telescope can see such a small and distant object, so among the first people Marcy called to illustrate the find was Daly City artist Lynette R. Cook.
Cook, 45, who was trained as a biological and botanical illustrator, went through the scientific data with Marcy and came up with a red-hot desert scene reminiscent of Utah with three mottled planets hanging low in the sky over auburn mesas.
"It's hard to compete with actual pictures, so I, for one, do not try," she said.
Dixon said a lot of his assignments these days are for what he describes as "weird physics."
For a piece in Scientific American on new cosmological theories, he produced a picture of squiggly "dark energy" elements feeding through a point into the known universe, pushing its expansion.
Dixon has been dabbling a little lately in loosening up his own style. "I'm trying to get away from that photographic, tight look," he said.
Perhaps one day space will lose its mystery and space art will go the way of painting fruit bowls.
Until then, "it's a big universe out there," he said.
