The sun was formed 4.6 billion years ago. It takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for its light to travel to Earth.

The calendar as we know it, based on cycles of the solar year, was first implemented four and a half centuries ago in 1582.

Days still track our planet’s rotation. Years follow our orbit around the sun. Months originally matched lunar cycles.

The average human life span equals 26,784 nights or sunrises. In some places, where people have to watch the sky for other reasons, it’s 12,000 less.

The oldest person on record lived 122 years. The oldest living now is 115.

The clock is a device that constitutes time as it measures it.

Time used to be local, based on the sun’s position. That changed on “The Day of Two Noons,” in 1883, when U.S. railroads adopted standardized time zones.

Four people who woke up this morning can say they’ve been on the moon. No one has stood there since 1972.

Up to 6500 stars are visible to the naked eye at any one location. In most cities around the world, one sees only a fraction of this.

Palomar Observatory, on a California mountain, once had the largest optical telescope in the world. It lost the title in 1976, but it’s still used to observe celestial objects, collecting incoming light.

Italo Calvino wrote a book about a person, a seeker of the cosmic in the everyday, who shares his name with that place. At 118 pages, Mr. Palomar takes maybe 3 to 4 hours to read.

AI doesn’t experience time as a continuous flow, or have a concept for it like we do. Its perception of “now”, if one can say that, will change as its processing speed increases.

We can predict where all the stars in the sky will be a hundred years from now.

There isn’t a good count for the number of fireflies every summer, but it’s easily in the hundreds of millions, or more. Each one lives for only a few weeks after emerging from the ground.

Once there were 3 to 5 billion passenger pigeons flying overhead in America. Now there are none.

Palomar is a group exhibition in two parts.

Curated by Karsten Lund.

Friends of Palomar Patron Circle: Maria Christina & Guy-Karim Caland Puymartin.

Renaissance Society programs are supported by the Teiger Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Image: Sarah and Joseph Belknap, 12 Months of the Sun, 2024

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