I’ve been gaping at this in slack-jawed wonder for two days now and I’ve only just now regained the self-composure needed to reel my tongue all the way back in. This is the coolest fan art I’ve ever seen. Ever. (The thumbnail doesn’t do it justice; click on the image to gargantu-size.)

This image should be next to “labor of love” in the dictionary, if they still print dictionaries with pictures. It’s the work of douglas e. graves, who styles himself deg, and you can find more eye-poppingly amazing images of the Enterprise at his web site on the “TOS.5 Enterprise” pages.

Deg says he’s been in love with The Big E since the day in 1966 he first laid eyes on it. “She is pure genius painted upon the canvas of space,” he rhapsodizes. “Beauty and strength combined like none before her, or since. A literal ship of dreams …” Being a graphic designer, deg felt a growing need to lend his artistic ability to clarify her appearance, while keeping “her lines and profile … 100% intact, and only refit her detailing with hopefully a more realistic industrial design and feel.”

And that he most certainly did. Deg’s images of the Enterprise look so much more like high-quality photos of a full-sized, inhabitable space craft. The secret appears to be in the details. I thought I was a nerd for this kind of thing, but deg appears to have way more time to tease out the details of every little bump and hull marking than I ever did. The spirit of the wooden model used to film the television series is still there, but in deg’s images Enterprise now looks like a ship you might actually see, if we had space stations and star ships which, sadly, we don’t, dammit. Dammit dammit DAMMIT!