The wall behind the sofa in our family room has been blank since we moved in to the house 11 years ago; we just never saw anything that caught our eye. Until recently, that is, when we were browsing images from the Hubble space telescope and thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have some Hubble images on this wall?”

Luckily for us, the folks at the Hubble Gallery must have had us in mind because they had a section for Wall Murals, featuring 5 different very large high-res images. We went with 30 Doradus (aka the Tarantula Nebula), the brightest star forming region in our galactic neighborhood.

Each image comes as a package of from 8 to 15 files, along with a template for making sure you get them in the proper order. Designed to be printed and then cut to fit a frame each individual file includes information about the tile, including where in the big picture the tile belongs, and a copyright release notice. The latter could be important depending on how/where you get the image printed.

Once printed you simply crop the meta info from the print and then put into your frame. In our case, we had the images printed directly on glass by Fracture so I had to crop the images before uploading them. Easy enough using the image editor of your choice, especially since the final image is a square. If you use Fracture or a similar service, make sure you remember to rotate the image 90° clockwise before uploading, since the download file from Hubble is oriented with the top of the image to the left.

We were very pleased with our experience with Fracture. The prints themselves are gorgeous. I ended up using the files intended for 16″ x 16″ prints to produce the 11″ x 11″ we went with. We might have gone for something a bit bigger, but the only larger size they offer was 23″ x 23″, which would have been a bit too large for the space we had. Delivery time was reasonable (about a week from order to door), and the prints were well packed and protected; no damage on any of them.

My only real complaint with the experience was that I could only upload one image at a time to add to the cart. But in the end, this is a minor complaint in what is overall a well designed experience.

One suggestion for the team at Fracture would be to include the uploaded file’s name on the label attached to the packing for each print. Probably isn’t a big deal in most cases, since most prints are probably easily individually recognizable, but for a “puzzle” like this it would be handy. As luck would have it, I uploaded the images in order, and the labels had a helpful “1 of 15”, “2 of 15”, etc.

Hanging the prints was a straightforward geometry problem. Center the mural horizontally with the sofa, and then have it slightly higher than center vertically between the top of the sofa and the ceiling in the room. Starting with tile #13 (bottom row, middle tile), I marked the location for the screw hanger (provided with each print). Then using a carpenter level, with 12″ measured out, marked locations for the remaining screws. (Each hanger was 12″ apart – 11″ for the print and 1″ for the distance between each print.)

Here again is where the quality of the product from Fracture proved itself. The slots for hanging on the back of each print were precisely located, all of them in exactly the same place (within the tolerance of the tape measure I was using).

Unfortunately, the location of the final installation does not lend itself to a good photo, at least not using natural light and especially not during the day when glare from the windows on the opposite wall make it impossible to get a straight on shot. Rest assured, though, that it looks as great as it sounds.