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According to the Baltimore Sun across unimaginable gulfs of space and time, a star very much like our sun is dying. Its nuclear fuel used up, a series of awesome explosions rocks its surface, ejecting material outward in a luminous shell of expanding hot gases a thousand times the diameter of our solar system.

Now an image of that event, which occurred 3,000 light-years away in the Cat's Eye Nebula and was recorded by cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, will be among the highlights of a spectacular exhibition that opens this week at the Walters Art Gallery.

Mapping the Cosmos: Images from the Hubble Space Telescope presents a vision of the universe that normally is invisible to us, in part because of the great distances involved and the obscuring effects of our atmosphere, and in part because Hubble's unblinking eye, orbiting 350 miles above Earth's surface, detects wavelengths of light that our eyes can't see.

The show also offers an intriguing taste of what's to come later next month when the Walters opens its major spring exhibition on the history of cartography. Maps: Finding Our Place in the World will bring visitors face-to-face with an extraordinary collection of historically significant maps from the Middle Ages to modern times.

But are Hubble's photographs really art?

"We're showing them because we believe mapping the ends of the universe represents the most contemporary expression of a long history of map-making," says Walters director Gary Vikan. "Plus the opportunity to partner with the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University was too good to pass up. It's the kind of thing that only we could do because we're all here in Baltimore."

As scientific documents, data from the Hubble's cameras have provided scientists with invaluable information about the birth and death of distant stars, the presence of planets around distant suns and the evolution of the universe as a whole.

All that and more is encoded in the binary strings of ones and zeros beamed down by Hubble to the Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt and then forwarded to the Space Telescope Science Institute on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University.

But as anyone who has ever gazed at the night sky knows, the heavens are also a realm of surpassing beauty and profound mystery in their own right, from the bright orb of the moon to the lacy patterns of stars that make up the constellations of the zodiac.

"To me, the photographs are both art and science," says Mario Livio, a senior astrophysicist and head of the office of public outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

"The data was originally taken to answer specific scientific questions, but the images are so stunningly attractive they become works of art in their own right, even if you don't know anything about science," Livio adds.

That was certainly the idea that prompted Walters curator Ben Tilghman to take on the project. Tilghman, a curatorial fellow in the Walters' manuscripts and rare books department who is also writing a dissertation on medieval art at Hopkins, worked with undergraduate museum science students there to design the show specifically for presentation in an art museum.

"One of the things the students came up with early on is that this show could do something most science museums can't, which is give people a chance to look at the images as aesthetic objects rather than as just scientific information," Tilghman says.

"By giving them a physical form they don't usually have - larger, vibrant reproductions of images seen on computer screens - we give them a scale people will respond to the same way they respond to Italian Renaissance paintings," Tilghman says. "That lets you see textures and details of color you normally don't see."

That images still manage to awaken a sense of awe and wonder among viewers is proof of their value as objects of study in an art museum, according to Walters director Vikan.

"One of the biggest problems in art is how do you give expression to the divine?" Vikan asks.

"When I look at these photos, I'm awe-struck not just because what you see took place thousands of years ago but because it compels you to try to reconcile science and spirituality. I hope it spurs other people to sort of plumb the depths, because all maps have that power to provoke us to find our place in the broader scheme of things."