New York based photographer Navid Baraty (previously featured for his stunning photos of New York City Intersection) who works for high profile clients such as National Geographic, Apple, CNN, and NASA, to name a few, has been working on a little side project he calls WANDER. “Wander” is a fictional deep space probe that takes pictures of the mysterious cosmos and beams them back to its owner. These pictures show alien planets, nebulas, globular clusters and even the elusive black hole. Of course, the space probe isn’t real and so are these images, but they look almost believable. What’s unbelievable is the way these photos were taken. Baraty placed household items such as chalk, makeup and baby powder, and a couple of basic food ingredients such as cinnamon and curry powder over a photo scanner and scanned them with the lid open.

This photo series reminds me of Christopher Jonassen’s photos of frying pans that look like alien planets. If you haven’t seen those, you must.

Planet - bottom of a glass containing half and half, water, food coloring
Stars - salt, cinnamon, baking powder