A consciousness investigation of photographic representation for night skies : Analysis of generation, tourism experiences and motivation for astrotourism

Tourism research has accumulated a variety of studies on photographs and images of tourism destinations. This paper analyzes the public’s perception of three-night sky photographs with the aim of testing the proposition that people may internalize images that they cannot perceive in physical reality. The results of the analysis suggest that the above proposition is supported, at least in the context of astrotourism (AT). An association was found between age and the perception of night sky photographs, suggesting that people in their 50s and 60s internalize images that transcend reality.
On the other hand, no association was found between the experience of AT and the perception of night sky photography, or between the willingness to participate in AT and the perception of night sky photography. Although this paper has several research limitations, we believe that the results of this study, in which a high percentage of respondents reported feeling a sense of reality in landscapes that cannot be seen in physical reality, have implications for various studies on tourism and photography, or tourism and images.