A Virtual Book Tour: Eight Easy Observing Projects for Amateur Astronomers

 We're talking with David Cortner, co-author and photographer of Eight Easy Observing Projects for Amateur Astronomers, available from Kalmbach Press. So, why this book. How did it come about?
A few years ago I realized I wasn't likely to escape the bright skies around my suburban home for some time. I started "commuting" to dark skies, as a lot of amateur astronomers do, but that made stargazing too contrived, too pre-meditated to be a lot of fun. I wanted to indulge deep-sky fetishes in my back yard, but it was clear I wasn't going to move to rural Arizona soon.

Photography offered a way out. Narrow-band filters can effectively turn off streetlights, so I could sit in the back yard and practice the Tao of Guiding. I could at least enjoy deep-sky astrophotography even if I couldn't have the kind of black-sky views I really want.

If you couldn't see it, you could at least photograph it?
Yes, exactly. After doing that for a couple of years, you end up with a stack of interesting photographs. They work on you: they're fine to hang on the office door or inflict on your friends, but they represent an awful lot of work and a terrible amount of time just for that. It's not long before you think about finding an excuse to publish them.

So the book was written as a wrapper for the photographs?
No, not really, though the idea of doing some book started out that way. This particular project, 8 Projects, was an idea that was already kicking around at Kalmbach Publishing. They approached Nancy Hendrickson to do it, but she was just finishing up her Beginners' Guide to the Sun and didn't want to start another project right away. She knew me from my public postings on the CompuServe AstroForum and suggested to Kalmbach that I might be the right person to do this one.

You make it sound like being discovered at the cyber drugstore.
Well, that's the way I tell it. But after talking it over and thinking hard about it for a while, I decided I didn't really have 8 projects in me. 4 or 5, sure... Nancy felt the same way, so we drew up lists of 5 each, picked our favorite 4, and built the proposal and the book around them. I wrote my 4 chapters and did the photographs; Nancy wrote her 4 chapters and handled all the telephone calls, letters, the drek. We each think we got the better deal, so the arrangement must be fair.

About the photos. In "real life" you're a computer systems analyst [prior to July 1999, now I write and photograph fulltime. DC] and you've written custom image processing and analysis programs for astronomy. Any relation there?
Oh, sure. There's much more digital darkroom work in this book than wet, chemical darkroom work. I've been working with photography, telescopes, and computers for about the same amount of time --about 25 years with each!-- so it's no surprise that I'm excited about digital imaging and what it can do, should do, and what it shouldn't do. I'm not sure there's much that it can't do, but I think there's quite a lot that it shouldn't do.

Any "ethical" misgivings about the images?
No, and not for lack of looking. The things I've done with these images --sharpening some with deconvolution filters, adjusting the response curves, spotting out lint and airplane trails-- could all have been done very laboriously using manual techniques. I don't see why digital manipulation should be singled out for suspicion, nor why non-digital manipulation should be presumed to be more acceptable. A great many modifications just a lot easier to do digitally. Though this book doesn't have any images that couldn't have been done "the old fashioned way" -- with tons of time -- I don't draw the line there. In practice, I'm happy to do digitally what could not be done conventionally.

Computers have given photographers so much control over their images that it simply comes down to whether you trust that the photographer isn't lying. Word processors made it easier for writers to lie, too, but no one seriously suggests that that's a reason to go back to quill pens and ink wells. We're habituated to believe photographs; they have a kind of prima facie credibility. We're going to have to get over that soon. We'll have to start trusting photographers the way we do writers: selectively.

People are right to suspect that photographs may no longer represent what the world really looks like. But then, astronomical images never did.

What do you mean, "They never did?"
We wanted to give people an idea of what they might expect to see when they look in the eyepiece. If you're used to looking at the Moon or at the planets "live" but only at photos of the deep sky -- and this is a position many people find themselves in with a year-old telescope and a faltering passion for astronomy -- then you only think you know what to look for when you first look for things like nebulae and other galaxies. In the usual portraits of such things, very faint galaxies and mostly invisible nebulae look as gaudy as fireworks. If that's your only idea of what they're "supposed" to look like, then you're sure to be disappointed when you first find them in a telescope. They don't look anything like their pictures. That dismay leads to a lot of disappointment. One thing we wanted to do was help people to avoid that particular pitfall.

There was an aesthetic about astrophotography in the 50's and 60's and it's been influential ever since. It followed the high-contrast scientific imagery coming out of observatories where, of course, the whole point of photography was to record objects and details of objects that you couldn't see. That doesn't have to be the ruling aesthetic any more.

Don't get me wrong: I admire the work of those photographers. Clarence Custer, Henry Paul, Robert Little, and especially Alan McClure set the standard for what astrophotographs should look like. Those extremely stark pictures on Kodak spectrographic films depict the universe in a very beautiful way. There are some images after that style in the book, and on this page, too. But it's important to realize that that "look" is largely a product of the tools and techniques (and the intentions) brought to bear: they're beautiful but those pictures are very distant from the visual experience.

If you want to represent the sky as it looks, then the easiest way is with digital techniques. I have no qualms at all about using them.

So anything goes? You can change the photo any way you like?
Where'd you hear that? Look, some digital editing makes images look more like the visual impression of reality instead of taking them farther away from it -- sometimes a digitally manipulated image is closer to the truth than the unmanipulated image could ever be. Of course, "the visual impression of reality" isn't the sole criteria of photographic worth. Sometimes you want to show things that you couldn't see in a month of looking. I think in a work of this sort, however, that you can't just "make it up" and put together shots that bear no relation to the way the world is, even if you're not always trying to show the way the world looks.

I use some photographs of the Rosette Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, a couple of other showcase objects, to show the difference between the "classic" astrophotos of these objects and their visual appearance. Comet Hyakutake came by a little too late for us to include it, so I can show you a couple of images here: one is very garish, processed for maximum contrast, to bring out faint details. A 50's & 60's style of shot. The other is a combination of three different exposures, digitally combined to more closely resemble that comet's appearance in a telescope. You could probably do this with a lot of work in a conventional darkroom. It took only a couple of hours with a Polaroid slide scanner, three frames of black and white film and a reasonably fast computer. It wouldn't have taken that long if I hadn't kept screwing up.

Let's talk a little about the words. The chapters all seem to have very different voices.
You actually read it! Yes, they do. Nancy and I didn't make any particular effort to sound alike. We tried not to contradict each other too blatantly. We differ on binocular preferences, for instance. She wants this great, huge exit pupil and I advocate a much smaller exit pupil so you can be really sure all the light is getting funnelled into the observer's eyes. But that was her chapter... Likewise, I don't know that she's particularly sympathetic to my surliness about astronomy being used as "bait" to attract bright kids into a career path where there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. I can get quite excited about that. I call it "Hoop Dreams for PhD's." And then there's astronomers and their disconnectedness from broader concerns. Percival Lowell said that astronomy "per force made [them] hermits from their kind" which leads to charming idiosyncracies as well as to such embarassments as the Mount Graham imbroglio. That level of isolation just isn't necessary. In fact--

Yes, you can get excited. I see Kalmbach had the sense to drop any mention of Mount Graham from the final edit. Shall we move on, too? Who in particular was this book aimed at? Who were you writing for?
I -- I think "we," actually -- had in mind a very specific audience. Fortunately, we slopped over and it will appeal to a much broader one.

The person I had in mind went out and bought a telescope for some hyped-up "event of the century." He probably overpaid for it under the delusion that it was required in order to witness some never to be repeated event. Truth is, he probably didn't need the telescope to see what he wanted to see, and most "events of the century" have a way of coming around every few years anyway. We aimed to help him have a good look at that part of the natural world visible only at night. By the way, in percentage, it's 99 followed by a decimal, forty 9's and a 6. Other--

It's what?
What's what?

That number you reeled off...
Oh, here, let me write it out. This is why you should turn off the porch light; here's the fraction of the natural world visible only at night: 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999996%

I don't quite...
By volumn.

"By volumn?"
Or, "Buy the Volume." This is a virtual book tour, remember? You're no Charlie Rose are you?

And you're no John McPhee.
Fair enough. Allow me to belabor this just a bit more, please. The most distant part of the natural world you can see by day is the Sun, which is pretty interesting in its own right, by the way. And the most distant part of the natural world you can see at night with relative ease is--

"Relativities?"
No, "relative ease". The furthest thing you can see at night with a modest telescope is the quasar 3C-273. So if you take the volumn of the universe visible at night and compare it to what you can see by day -- the Grand Canyon, Alaska, the Himalayas, Antarctica, The Moon, everything out to the distance of the Sun -- you get...drum roll?

Uh, that number?
Yes, that number. If I were a chemist, they would name it after me. Like Avogadro.

Why, have you got one?
One what?

An avocado. You asked me if I'd like an avocado.
No! "As" Avogadro. As the chemists named their preposterous number for a man named Avogadro.

Back to the book. You were saying who else this book would appeal to.
Well, certainly to anyone with a closet telescope, one that's sitting in a closet unused, a token of enthusiasms that have been misplaced. But also to anyone who just vaguely thinks they might want a telescope or who wants to get involved, stay involved, or get someone else involved with recreational astronomy. Astronomical enthusiasm can look pretty arcane and off-putting to some earthists.

"Earthists"?
Yes, people who only look at things on earth. Do you like it?

No. It is an ugly sort of word.
I think so, too, but I only just thought of it. Could you scratch that part out?

Sorry, we're live on ethernet here.
OK, I understand.

Now that you've finished this project, or, rather, these eight projects, what's next?
Something about history, I think, something having to do with ways of understanding and identifying with people in the past, but since I don't see a lot of crossover interest between the audience for this book and the audience for that one, maybe I should just leave that alone for now. What other guests do you have on tonight?

What?
Don't I get to sit and chat with Sandra Bullock or --

There are no other guests.
What a crock!

Come on, you realize that you're just typing on your own computer don't you?  All the questions are yours, even that unfortunate avocado incident.
Get a grip! And buy the book.

To order the book, take a cruise on the Amazon.

To offer comments, feedback, or backlash, try some mail bonding.
 

Take me home, Mr. Wizard!