Astrophotography remains one of the most complicated forms of photography, but with today’s technology we get images not even Galileo or Newton would have even dreamt of. The Stimuleye catches up with Paul to get a better understanding on this ancient fascination for the Cosmos.

M45 - Pleiades Star Cluster. Photography by Paul Klauninger.

Miguel Batel: You must be happy winter is over. Last time we went out to the field must have been one of the coldest experiences I’ve ever had.

Paul Klauninger: I have mixed feelings about the winter really. While it can be very challenging to operate your equipment (and your fingers, for that matter) when it is –20o C, there are also a number of benefits. In the winter, the nights are much longer than the summer, so you can do much longer observing and imaging sessions. Also, the air tends to be cleaner, containing less dust and water vapour. That makes it better for imaging. And in the winter, you see a different part of the sky than in the summer, so you can see a completely different collection of celestial wonders. Finally, there are no mosquitoes or black flies in the winter, and that’s always a good thing.

MB: Being mostly subjects you can’t appreciate with your naked eye, or directly interact with, I’m curious to know what kind of emotional attachments you develop with your photographs?

PK: I guess my images are like a photo album of travel pictures, in that they remind me of places that I have visited. While it is true that most of the imaging subjects cannot be seen with the naked eye, my telescopes do in fact, allow me to see these without a camera.

When I look through a telescope at a nebula or galaxy that is thousands or millions of light-years away, I can’t help but wonder about other Earth-like planets in those places, and the potential for other advanced civilizations like our own. And when I see the images I’ve taken of those same places, they remind me of just how much more is out there that our limited vision cannot detect directly.

MB: Which have been some of your most significant or revealing photographs?

PK: One of my most favorite “revealing” images is one I took of the Pleiades star cluster. This is an object that you actually can see with the naked eye. It appears as a small dipper-like formation of seven very bright stars, just to the right of Orion. Not only does the image show these seven stars as brilliant blue beacons in the night, it shows hundreds of surrounding, lesser stars that are also part of that cluster. And the entire collection is wrapped in an ethereal, misty blue nebula. Photographically, it’s just a strikingly beautiful object.

Another favorite is actually a series of images that I took over a span of a few months of a very odd object in our solar system named Comet Holmes. Back in 2007, this dim, obscure little comet suddenly and explosively erupted. In a matter of 24 hours, its brightness increased by a million-fold and it easily became a naked-eye object. Before that, you would have needed a large telescope and sensitive camera to even capture it as dim speck of light. In the weeks after its eruption, it continued to expand and grow until it appeared larger than the full Moon, although nowhere near as bright. However, you could easily see this object as large round fuzzy patch in the sky. It wandered around the sky like that for months, until it gradually faded. I captured a series of images over that time period that nicely shows its growth and evolution. To this day, no one knows what caused this comet to erupt as it did.

Horsehead and Flame Nebulae. Photography by Paul Klauninger.

MB: The final image is a result of combining several exposures and filters, but how much creative input do you have on them?

PK: Actually, you have a fair bit of creative input as far as the final image is concerned. Many objects, such as the Orion Nebula for instance, have a very wide range of brightness. You have to layer several images of different exposure lengths to capture the entire range. For example, if you do a long exposure to capture faint nebulosities, you’ll wind up completely saturating the brighter areas in the image and therefore loosing the detail in those areas. By selectively layering and enhancing different areas, you can catch all the action.

MB: There are wavelengths of light and gases that camera sensors are not able to pick up. What percentage of the real deal do you think we are able to capture with the available technology?

PK: Well, from an imaging point of view, I’m personally still only capturing that portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye. This is only a tiny fraction of all the energies that are routinely emitted by objects in space. But if you look at all of mankind’s current astronomy endeavours, we can actually “see” these other portions of the Universe’s energy spectrum. That is because nowadays we use not only visible-light cameras, but also radio telescopes, and telescopes designed to view and capture images in the infra-red, ultra-violet, x-rays, and gamma rays. In this way, we get a much more complete idea of how the Universe operates, because we see such so much more of all the underlying processes.

Comet Hyakutake. Photography by Paul Klauninger.

MB: How far into space can we see with these instruments from earth?

PK: Well, the answer is quite far actually. As an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer, there are a number of objects such as distant galaxies you can capture that are many hundreds of millions of light-years away. There are even a few objects such as quasars that are a couple of billion light-years away. That’s pretty impressive using off-the-shelf amateur gear. And of course when you look at the professional level, the Hubble Space Telescope can record galaxies over 90% of the way across the known Universe.

MB: Which are some of the most challenging factors of astrophotography?

PK: There are a few.

When you are using a large telescope to take an image, its alignment to the stars and its movement to compensate for the Earth’s rotation must be very very precise. Otherwise the stars will appear as streaks, not as points of light. The reason for this is that unlike conventional photography, when you are imaging a galaxy or nebula, typically your exposures last anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes. All during this time, the telescope must gradually and precisely move to follow the object across the sky. There’s very little room for error.

Another factor is focusing. It’s challenging to focus on something that you often do not even see in the viewfinder! There are some tools available to help with this, but it can still be a time-consuming, trial-and-error process.

Finally, I’d have to say environmental conditions are a major factor. In the winter, operating at –20o C can make cables, machinery, and electronics behave in odd, frustrating ways. In the spring, overnight dewing tends to soak everything, including your lenses unless you take corrective measures. In the summer, short nights and hungry insects are the biggest problem.

And in all of this, there is our sky conditions. This is not the best part of the world for doing astrophotography (Ottawa, Canada). Our air masses can and do move rapidly, causing turbulence and frequently changing conditions. The jet stream just seems to love to throw weather systems our way, one after another, and often in very short timeframes. Turbulence in the air causes stars to bloat out in your images and washes out fine details, making it appear as though you are looking through a dirty window.

Orion and Running Man Nebulae. Photography by Paul Klauninger.

MB: With Canon releasing its 60Da camera, aimed for astrophotographers, do you think there will be many new enthusiasts aiming at the sky?

PK: I think the Canon 60Da could certainly increase the number of folks interested in attempting astrophotography. It has a number of built-in features that very favourable for this pursuit. And there are certainly some forms of rewarding astrophotography that you can do just by mounting your camera on a tripod and tripping the shutter with a timer or remote release cable. However, for the majority of astrophotography work, there is so much more involved that just the particular camera that you’re using. The telescope(s) that one uses, along with advanced image processing skills, are a big part of this game.

MB: You must have been surprised more than once while developing your images…

PK: I’ve been surprised on more than a few occasions when I discover that I’ve captured a bright meteor passing through my imaging field, or when I look at a very long exposure and discover that I’ve captured very distant galaxies that I didn’t even know were there.

I also like mysteries. I’ve taken a couple of astro-video sequences that captured objects I can’t explain. One was of a satellite-like object that sailed through the field I was imaging. When I calculated its apparent orbit, I found that it was a long way out, even beyond the belt of geosynchronous satellites orbiting the Earth.

This is an area of space where we don’t tend to put a lot of satellites, so it struck me as odd. I asked a friend who loves to do satellite tracking and has access to numerous databases of satellite orbits to check this. He came back and told me that there were no known matches, at least in the data that was available to him. Very odd.

Another strange one was of an object I filmed while shooting an aurora on video. When I reviewed the footage afterwards, I discovered an odd object in the sky that just appeared to materialize, stay visible for a few frames, and then just dematerialize or “wink out”. Very odd as well. I’ve come to the conclusion that it was either a rare head-on “point meteor” or a Romulan warbird temporarily de-cloaking to beam someone up or down.

MB: What was the last thing that stimulated you?

PK: Rare and unpredictable astronomical events always give me a rush. Intense auroral displays, brilliant fireball meteors, flamboyant comets, solar and lunar eclipses, the transit of Venus … these types of events really get me going, astronomically speaking.

Lizard photo: Whitney Lewis-Smith.

Legs with severed head (Guy's head, btw) Peter Shmelzer.

Men wrestling: Matthew Dayler / Photo of man laughing: Tony Fouhse.

Creepy baby head: Robert Farmer.

Guy's taxidermy collection.

She has recently put together the exhibition 19th-Century British Photographs; the third in a series of five exhibitions of selected masterpieces of the collection of the National Gallery. This exhibition traces the development of photography in Britain over the course of the Victorian era; from early, salted paper prints, to daguerreotypes, to magnificent turn-of-the-century platinum prints.

I met Lori at a guided tour of the exhibition. Ann Thomas, also a curator at the National Gallery, whom I had met in one of the events I organized introduced me to her and we briefly talked about meeting up to chat about Mexican artists included in the collection amongst other things.

Not too long after we met and talked about astrophotography, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Ron Mueck, her twin sister and some of the cultural differences I have noticed while in Canada.

For my first contribution to The Stimuleye, I will be sharing some of the questions I had for her on the exhibition.

Miguel Batel: How did the idea for this exhibition came together?

Lori Pauli: Basically, with our drawings collection we started a series of exhibitions based on our holdings, so we decided for photographs we would do the same thing. The first one was modern photographs from the collection, then we did 19th-Century French, and after this it will be American Photography from 1900 to 1950.

The fifth probably will be either American 1950 to the present, or possibly our holdings of Canadian photography.

Will this exhibition be travelling?

It will, I’m not sure exactly where it’s travelling, we have had interest from across the country,  and we are just deciding where its going to end up.

How many photographs did you have to go through, and how many are currently exhibited?

There are about 112 photographs in the show, and I think I went through 2,000 in terms of 19th-Century photographs from the collection, so there was quite a bit to choose from, which was great.

The exhibition features some of the earliest photographic techniques. Which are some of the photographs you would consider to be the most important?

Well, of course some of the earliest would be the daguerreotypes, and we have a really great daguerreotype, that is quite large format; I don’t know if you remember it, but its of a man called John Berret Nelson and its around 8” by 10”, its fairly large compared to what normal daguerreotype sizes are. It’s called a mammoth plate, its beautifully created – masterfully crafted- and it comes with its original frame as well, so that is a real gem in the collection.

In terms of British we have a lot of salted paper prints by William Henry Fox Talbot, so those are other also really important pieces, because that’s the inventor of paper photography, it’s really great to have those.

Are there any borrowed items?

No, it is all from the collection.

You acquired some photographs for this exhibition, any specially difficult one to get?

One of them was the piece of armour, we think its by a woman called Jane Clifford. She was married to Charles Clifford, who was the most important photographer working in Spain. He made a lot of use of Queen Isabelle II construction projects and he did use of her armoury and her treasures. We recently acquired that.

We bought three of these photographs, but we are not quite sure if Jane just made the print or if she was behind the camera…

Another recent acquisition is the Wells Cathedral by Frederick H. Evans; he kept out any kind of reference to the present day or any kind of additions that would have been put on and just kept it to its original architectural features.

How did you get involved with photography?

I was actually in a dance programme, and I took a course in dance criticism but the only way we could criticize dance other than watching films was to look at photographs and write a review based on the photograph. Then I realized I liked photography more than dance (laughs).

Then I took a few courses on history of photography, but you couldn’t get a degree here in Canada, so I completed a degree in art history. I wanted to work on Degas and his photographs, but I ended up working on his landscape paintings; and then I came here to work on the Degas show in 87’ or 88’, when we first moved into this building.

But I also took courses on how to make a daguerreotype and how to make an ambrotype and how to make a tintype, because I always find I cant really talk about the process if I haven’t made it myself.

This is a wonderful building by Moshe Safdie, how is it for working?

Its fantastic and it’s great for exhibiting. The curators were actually involved in discussions with Moshe Safdie, so for photography we wanted the ceilings to be fairly low, and we didn’t want windows or natural light in order to protect the works. It’s a great building.

What are some of your next projects for the NGC?

I’m also doing an installation on hands including prints, drawings, photographs and even sculpture, so its all images of the hand that artists have done. There is even a Ron Mueck hand that was a small prototype study for one of the baby sculptures he did. I decided to do it because its a subject artists have always done, its sort of readily available and they can draw their own hand or photograph their own hands… there are about fifty objects.

We have great photographs by a contemporary American photographer called Gary Schneider who basically presses his hand up on the emulsion of film, and the image is actually just made of the heat of the hand; It’s almost a self-portrait in a way.

Tell me more about some of your personal favourites on this exhibition.

One of them would have to be Poor Jo, the one on the cover of the catalogue. It is by a Swedish photographer called Oscar Gustave Rejlander, but he only worked in England. I have always been interested in the idea of staged photography and acting in photography, and we has one of the first to do that.

He did a really famous one called The Two Ways of Life, and it was scandalous in its day because it included naked women and Queen Victoria actually bought a copy of it. I would actually like to do an exhibition on his work.

I also really like this daguerreotype by John Benjamin Dancer. The portrait is of a man called Richard Buxton who was botanist and was known by cataloguing and identifying all the flowers and ferns within sixteen miles of Manchester and he wrote a book on this. But it turns out he was by day a shoe-maker, and was famous in scientific circles for this publication; today it would never happen.

He’s very humble, apparently he was born to a fairly well off family, but they came on to hard times, and he had to drop out of school at an early age so he lost the ability to read because he only got a smattering of it at the beginning. So it is remarkable that he could compose a book in adulthood. I just like that picture a lot.

Where did the quotes come from?

I took them from all different places. There is one of John Herschel I took from a letter he wrote to Talbot, it was his reaction to first seeing a daguerreotype. He was working with Talbot on the paper photograph process, but he saw the daguerreotype in France he wrote back very excited saying ¨you’ve got to see this things, they are pretty miraculous”.

The one from Julie Margaret Cameron its published in her book “annals of my glasshouse” but I like the way it talked about how photography affected her family life, the fact that she was staining dining room tablecloths and things like that.

I just like to give a feel to the times…

19th-Century British Photographs / 4 February – 17 April 2011 / National Gallery of Canada