Jill Whitmore’s walls are covered in her paintings, from a snowy portrait of her backyard to a giraffe with candy and chocolate-covered strawberries on its neck that her grandchildren love.

Though she has always been creative, Whitemore’s passion is for science. She was an 8th-grade science teacher at Rundlett Middle School for 22 years, where she assigned students to find constellations and keep journals of the moon phases.

“Since the time of caveman, since the time of forever, these stars have been there and they will never change,” she would tell them.

When Whitmore retired five years ago and moved to San Francisco where her husband had an interim position, she needed a project.

That’s when she started on an oil painting of roughly 400 tiny, colorful galaxies that float against a black background.

Whitmore has always loved art, but it took a friend nudging her into Joe Blajda’s “Painting from Photographs” class at Kimball Jenkins in downtown Concord to pursue it.

Between her knowledge of outer space from teaching and her knack for painting, this San Francisco passion project would soon impress Blajda back home in Concord.

Blajda gave her some pointers on mixing colors and a few example galaxies for reference but was not involved in its creation.

Eight months later, “Deep Space” was complete.

“When she showed me the finished product, I was blown away,” Blajda said.

Compared to her other paintings at home, Deep Space seemed to get little attention from visitors, but a trip to see her sister in South Carolina brought the painting to the right eyes.

Whitmore showed her painting to Laura Baker while in South Carolina, who used to work at NASA’s Educator Resource Center. Baker showed a picture of the painting to her friends in Florida who were excited to hang it up at the NASA Kennedy Space Center.

“It’s going to find a home there. It’s just a matter of which department wall it’s gonna get to hang on,” said Baker.

Most likely, Deep Space will end up on the walls of Kennedy’s Center for Space Education. That’s where it will get the most foot traffic from people who appreciate it most — teachers and students.

“It just was the last picture I would ever pick that somebody would pick to display,” said Whitemore.

And the fact that it’s a combination of science and art – just like Whitemore – makes her even more thrilled.

“It just reminded me about everything that I loved that I had retired from,” she said.

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