Every day

Every day that you learn something is a good day. Today I stumbled over nature printing, via this slideshow on the Guardian website.

Nature printing means using objects from nature to make produce an image. It ranges from leaves




to cyanotypes



to meteorites.



Which, given the past week's theme, feels like a good full stop.

Images
Sage leaf imprint on a page of Leonardo's Codice Atlantico
Cyanotype from Anna Atkin's 'Photographs of British Algae'
Print made from a slice of a meteorite

Astromagnificence

Last week's post about sciencey stuff got me thinking more about astrophotography, and it's what I talked about on the radio today.

The first subject of astrophotography, unsurprisingly, was the Moon. Louis Daguerre had a bash at photographing it in 1839, but tracking errors meant his moon came out as a fuzzy spot. John Draper, an American doctor, chemist and scientific experimenter, made the first successful photograph of the moon a year later, a daguerreotype made over 20 minutes.

As new photographic processes were invented photography revolutionised astronomy, as celestial bodies that couldn't previously be discerned were captured. Check out Greg Allen's post on James Keeler's lantern slides of spiral nebulae, made in 1888, and Mark Graybill on how we slowly stopped thinking in terms of Milky Way = The Galaxy, and started thinking about about our local system being one of many.

Long exposure colour photographs of the night sky bring out elements we can't perceive, produced by light waves the colour sensors in our eyes aren't able to pick up. Something like the Hubble telescope is a different beast again. The telescope doesn’t use film at all; it records light from the universe with electronic sensors, in black and white. In another example, the Spitzer telescope captures infrared light, which is part of the spectrum we can’t even see. So the colourised images we do get to see have colour added during the processing stage. Basically, scientists map these images onto the blues, reds and greens that our eyes can perceive.

Many full-color Hubble images are combinations of three separate exposures — one each taken in red, green, and blue light. When mixed together, these three colors of light can simulate almost any color of light that is visible to human eyes. (This is how tvs and computer monitors recreate colour).

So, is it all trickery? I think not. The colour is added by scientists to help us understand the structure and subtle features of celestial bodies. There are open explanations of how this is done: in addition to Ray Villard's article on how colour is used in astrophotography, which I linked to last week, and Robert Hunt (the Spitzer's Visualisation Scientist) on the same topic, the Hubble website has a great section explaining how colour is used in Hubble telescope photographs.

A side effect, of course, is that images are produced that we seem to beautiful, even magnificent (see the Guardian's art critic Jonathan Jones on this topic). The closest I've ever come to a religious feeling was when I read about cosmic rays - muons that come from outer space, pass through the earth's atmosphere, and down into the Earth. I suddenly felt like something much bigger than myself. Particles that had come from the sun could be passing through me right now. (I know, woo-woohhh). But astrophotography seems to bring forth that same sense of wonder that, in these jaded times, it's pretty hard to find.

I heart science

Sometimes my lunchtime tab line-up is so good, I just have to share it. Today's theme: science literacy, and pictorial trickery.

Over the past 18 months or so, I've put a lot of reading hours into trying to improve my science understanding. I'm not necessarily trying to understand scientific concepts or formula, although there's been a bit of that happening along the way. What I'm trying to understand is how science happens - the process, the history, the culture, the philosophy.

The way I learn is through narrative. Often I'll start with a piece of historical fiction (say Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy) move on to a history of science from that period, and then delve into individual scientists (for example, James Gleick's Newton bio, and Lisa Jardine on Robert Hooke).

One of my favourite parts of this progression is reading reviews of science books; Freeman Dyson's collected reviews have been a revelation in this respect. And now I can add - from today's line-up - Margaret Atwood's review of Edward Wilson's Anthill, the first novel by this 'grand old man of ants'. I think a good review gives you ideas for how you might read a book: this review certainly achieves that objective.

Given my interest in catching myself in the science I missed (or ignored) at school, this article by Alice Bell on science literacy made me feel a little shabby. I'm doing my best, but what if I'm turning myself into one of those dreaded a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing people ("I don't know much about science, but I know what I believe")?

This interview with Craig Venter (whose company sequenced the gene faster and more cheaply than the government-sponsored Human Genome Project) gives me a little faith though. According to Venter, we've both learned enormous amounts, and hardly anything at all, from sequencing the genome. And I think I understand enough about the ethos of science to feel this is okay - even good.

So, on to pictorial trickery. There's been a rash of astronomy-porn on the web recently, and like many, I'm curious about whether the universe really looks as pretty as it does in photos. In his explanation of how astrophotography works, Ray Villard makes an analogy I really enjoyed:

Many celestial pictures look garish because the universe is, well, garish. Hot gaseous clouds of hydrogen, helium, and oxygen glow with the same intense color saturation you would see on nighttime stroll down the Las Vegas strip.

The best astrophotography is comparable to Ansel Adams’ nature pictures. Adams worked to extract the maximum information and quality from his photographs. This required many hours in the darkroom for Adams to reconstruct an image that reproduced the broad tonal range and contrast that our eye perceives on a sunny day.

And just 'cos I'm on the theme of astronomy and pretty pictures - Ethan Spiegel on where metor showers come from. It's stellar.

Love that list

Last year Umberto Eco put out 'The Infinity of Lists', a book that accompanied the exhibition he put together after a two-year residency at the Louvre. From The Art Newspaper

“The subject of lists has been a theme of many writers from Homer onwards. My great challenge was to transfer it to painting and music and to see whether I could find equivalents in the Louvre, because frankly when I suggested the subject I had no idea how I would write about visual lists,” says Eco.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I spent some time on the International Astronomical Union website. A book I'm currently reading about the astronomers William Herschel and Caroline Herschel quoted from the IAG's naming conventions:

• Trojan asteroids (those that librate in 1:1 resonance with Jupiter) are named for heroes of the Trojan War (Greeks at L4 and Trojans at L5).
• Trans-Jovian Planets crossing or approaching the orbit of a giant Planet but not in a stabilizing resonance (so called Centaurs) are named for centaurs.
• Objects crossing or approaching the orbit of Neptune and in stabilizing resonances other than 1:1 (notably the Plutinos at the 2:3 resonance) are given mythological names associated with the underworld
• Objects sufficiently outside Neptune's orbit that orbital stability is reasonably assured for a substantial fraction of the lifetime of the solar system (so called Cubewanos or "classical" TNOs) are given mythological names associated with creation.
• Objects that approach or cross Earth's orbit (so called Near Earth Asteroids) are generally given mythological names.

I was in love. Classical references, technical jargon, extreme specificity, and a dollop of crazy? They had me at "names of pet animals are discouraged".

If you share my delight in such things, you should definitely check out the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature: here's a snippet from the page about the naming of planetary features



And another: craters on the moon are named after:

Deceased scientists, scholars, artists and explorers who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field. Deceased Russian cosmonauts are commemorated by craters in and around Mare Moscoviense. Deceased American astronauts are commemorated by craters in and around the crater Apollo. Appropriate locations will be provided in the future for other space-faring nations should they also suffer fatalities.