Space photography

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pillars of Creation (dt. Pillars of Creation ) in the Eagle Nebula (false color) taken by Hubble in 1995.

The Spaceshots reflect shooting in or into space. The objects are predominantly astronomical objects and are recorded from the earth, from satellites or from space vehicles.

The objects range from galaxies , stars , planets , asteroids , comets to phenomena such as solar eclipses or the northern lights .

From an astronomical-scientific point of view, space photography is used for research into the development of the universe , its phenomena such as black holes or dark energy , but also for research into earth-like celestial bodies . But it also finds a number of applications in the geosciences , such as B. geology , archeology , meteorology , glaciology or climatology to life sciences .

With the possibilities of digital photography , space photography also became a genre popular among amateur photographers . Popular are e.g. B. "Astroscapes", a combination of space photography and landscape photography .

Since the human eye can only see space objects very faintly, small and almost colorless, space photography reveals many details that humans cannot see.

Several images in the genre have fundamentally changed our view of earth, the blue planet. Iconographic images such as Earthrise (1968), Blue Marble (1972) or Pale Blue Dot (1990) became symbols of environmental protection and gave, among other things, impulses for the still young environmental photography . The Hubble Space Telescope provided other iconographic images, such as Pillars of Creation (1995).

application areas

overview

Star tracks as long exposures

Depending on the approach or task, there are other styles of photographic representation.

Tasks of the astro sciences

Astrophotography is often about the deep sky , i.e. H. Objects like galaxies that are very large or very far away. The special cameras used in astronomy are called astrographs . They make it possible to capture large fields of the starry sky on photo plates and

Tasks in cartography, geodesy and geoinformatics

Cartography of the earth

The usual aerial photographs taken from airplanes for the transfer to cartography and surveying can be done more cheaply, more precisely and faster with the help of satellite photographs . Today's level of detail is up to 30 × 30 cm. Often, data can be drawn directly into the updating of the topographic maps or for surveying tasks.

Cartography of other celestial objects

The photos taken of the moon as part of the Apollo program were used as the basis for the cartography of the moon. Space photography is also used for the cartography of planets.

Tasks in the earth and life sciences

Photography of the earth is very important in the geosciences. With it it is possible to depict phenomena that are difficult to explore on the ground. An example from satellite geodesy is the recording of sediment deposits at the Amazon estuary, which the space shuttle made in 1992. Applications can be found in geology, archeology, meteorology (such as stratospheric clouds ) or climatology and beyond that in the life sciences.

Military remote reconnaissance tasks

The observation of the earth also takes place from a military point of view and in the context of geographic espionage. This is how long-range reconnaissance came about historically for military use.

Artistic photography

Astroscapes: Rotation image

Artistic photography can also be designed with objects from space. One possible application is the recording of rotational movements of the earth through long exposures. A major genre is the astroscapes, a combination of space photography and landscape photography . Stylistically, space and earth are related.

Objects and examples from space travel

Objects

The objects range from galaxies , stars , planets , asteroids , comets to phenomena such as solar eclipses or the northern lights .

Examples from space travel

Hubble telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched on April 24, 1990 aboard a space shuttle . The mission is an unprecedented success: the observatory has not only provided scientists with a flood of new data, but has also given the general public a new picture of the universe. According to information from ESA and NASA , the telescope has so far sent around 570,000 images of 30,000 celestial bodies to Earth (as of 2010). Of the 5 Hubble instruments, three are designed photographically:

  • Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS)
  • Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3)
  • Infrared camera.

The Hubble optical system is called Optical Telescope Assembly, or OTA for short. The photographic evaluation of the Hubble Deep Field , a field of approx. 265,000 galaxies, which was recorded in 1995, 2003, 2004, and 2012, should z. B. Provide insights into the early universe. A famous painting by Hubble is Pillars of Creation (1995).

The main advantage of such space observation from orbit is the elimination of disturbances on earth, such as air particles, weather or light contamination.

Apollo program

Earthrise: December 24, 1968: The first image of the rise of the earth above the lunar horizon, taken by Bill Anders

Swedish Hasselblad cameras achieved great fame primarily through their use in the Apollo program in the USA, but not only there. Hasselblad did not invent medium format photography, but it is often used synonymously due to its high level of acceptance. Hasselblad cameras served on many NASA Missions the photographic documentation, such as 1962, a Hasselblad 500 C in the Mercury ( Walter Schirra ), 1966, a Hasselblad SWC in the Gemini 9 , 1969 in the first Mondlandung a Hasselblad 500 EL / 70 ( Apollo 11 ), a Hasselblad 500 EL / M in the Apollo Soyuz project in 1975 and five Hasselblad 553 ELS on the Discovery in 1998 .

Earthrise ( English , Earth rise ') is the name of NASA -photos AS8-14-2383HR, taken by William other during the flight of Apollo 8 . The picture was taken on December 24, 1968 during the fourth of ten planned orbits of the moon with a Hasselblad 500 camera , focal length 250 mm. The Time Magazine took Earthrise in its selection of "100 most influential photographs of history" link. The curators wrote: "The picture is our first colored view of the earth from outside and it has contributed to the development of the environmental movement ." In addition, "Earthrise" showed people that humanity in a cold and dangerous cosmos was " very good "go. The photo is one of the most reproduced photos of all time. Because of the effect one speaks of an iconographic image or a photographic relic .

A silver-lacquered Lunar Surface Camera (LSC), a modified Hasselblad Data Camera HDC-500, was taken along for the first Apollo 11 moon landing mission. A Zeiss Biogon 60 mm ƒ / 5.6 lens from Germany served as optics . Due to the symmetrical structure of the lens, distortion and all other image errors have been corrected: straight lines remain straight, the images are rich in detail and sharp right into the corners. The LSC had a 70 mm film magazine. For the mission, a specially made thin Kodak film was inserted, which enabled 200 photos per magazine. Recordings were made with negative films and slides . The original picture of Buzz Aldrin, taken by Neil Armstrong, is a color slide.

Réseau grids were installed in this LSC camera , which added visually visible crosses to each shot. The aim was to enable photogrammetric measurements, such as precisely mapping the lunar landing area, on the basis of the films. Neil Armstrong took all photos on the lunar surface with the LSC in hand or on his chest. There was a second Hasselblad in black for photos from inside the lunar module Eagle. The optics were a fast Zeiss Planar 80 mm ƒ / 2.8 lens. With the third HEC camera, Michael Collins took photos on board the command module, which remained in orbit. All other NASA missions also had Hasselblad cameras on board.

Neil Armstrong is reflected in the visor of his colleague Buzz Aldrin as he photographs it with his Hasselblad 500 EL

Until 2012 it was assumed that the two Hasselblads on board the Eagle had remained on the moon because they wanted to save weight for the return flight to Earth - according to NASA instructions. However, after Neil Armstrong's death, the widow found a white bag in the deceased's closet. Inside was the camera Armstrong had used on the moon. Armstrong had taken them and duly reported "ten pounds of various equipment" over the radio. This was important so that the engineers could correctly calculate the trajectory on the return to Earth with the additional 4.5 kilograms. The widow donated the Hasselblad to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC in 2012

In 2005, NASA was researching the original Apollo 11 footage Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong made because they had disappeared. NASA's Dick Nafzger admitted after three years that the search was unsuccessful.

Blue Marble , captured by Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972

A photo of the Apollo program that many people know is " Blue Marble ". It was captured by Apollo 17 en route to the moon, overlooking Africa and the Indian Ocean. The photo has the official designation AS17-148-22727. It was created by Harrison Schmitt on December 7, 1972 at 10:39 UTC with a 70-millimeter - Hasselblad - medium format camera and a Zeiss -80-millimeter prime lens - Lens added. Blue Marble wasn't even the first full image of planet Earth, as satellites had provided a full image before.

Voyager 1

On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 space probe captured Earth as a tiny part of the Milky Way from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometers. The picture is titled " Pale Blue Dot ". It shows, also an iconographic image , the earth as a tiny point ( "dot "). The scientist Carl Sagan commented on the picture in 1994 with the words: "Look again at that dot, That's here. That's home. That's us."

history

With the invention of photography in the 1830s, these celestial body observations could soon be captured in images, preserved and shared with others. The history of space photography began with early black and white photographs of passing comets or the moon from the 19th century. Of particular interest was certainly the moon. This referred to the mysticism, mythology of the satellite, but probably also to the desire to travel there.

In March 1840, probably on March 26, 1840, the Englishman John W. Draper from the roof observatory at New York University made a first usable photo of the full moon using the daguerreotype method with chemically treated, silver-coated metal plates. The picture is considered to be the oldest image in space photography.

Henry Draper photographed the Orion Nebula , an emission nebula in the constellation Orion , on September 30, 1880 .

The Scottish astronomer David Gill took the first photograph of a wandering star with the title "Great Comet" on November 14, 1882 from Cape Town.

Scientific astronomy recognized the usefulness of photographic evidence early on, as did the image as a research object. An example of this is a picture taken on October 6, 1923 by the US astronomer Edwin Hubble . It shows the neighboring galaxy Andromeda . Hubble was able to prove that there are other galaxies than the Milky Way and that space is expanding. Hubble is said to have written down the handwritten notes " Eureka !"

The first space photography on color film was made by Bill Miller of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California in 1958.

With the Hubble space telescope, space photography was decoupled from sources of interference on earth such as dust particles, weather or light emissions from 1990 onwards.

Space travel brought iconographic photos of the earth against the velvet black background of the universe ("Earthrise", "Blue Marple" or "Pale Blue Dot") of Apollo 8 (1968), Apollo 17 (1972) and Voyager 1 (1990).

In addition to NASA, space images of taikonauts from the Chinese Shenzhou missions (Shenzhou 5 to 11) have also been published since 2003 . From 2004 the Mars rover sent images of Mars to Earth.

In 2008 NASA opened a freely available online image archive, which was gradually being filled. Over 140,000 files (images, videos, audio) from more than 60 collections are currently available. Despite its size, the multimedia database is not comprehensive, it is more of a “best of NASA archive”.

In 2015, the Ruhr-Universität Bochum published the largest space image to date with a size of 194 gigabytes and a display of 46 billion pixels. From 2010 to 2015, 268 individual images of the Milky Way were made and combined at the European Southern Observatory ESO in Chile.

The power of the modern representation of celestial objects is probably responsible for the fact that space photography has become an increasingly interesting genre for amateur photographers since the advent of digital photography in the 2000s.

technology

equipment

NGC 281 (“Pacman Nebula”), photographed with a 130 mm amateur telescope and DSLR camera

Space photography represents the development of digital photography like no other area. Basically, photos of space can be taken with any camera. The minimum requirements are the use of a tripod , a remote release , switching off the flash and manual focusing. For high-quality recordings, however, special equipment is recommended, e.g. B. Combinations of digital full-frame single-lens reflex cameras with a very large image sensor and high-quality telescope. There are, for example, CCD sensor- cooled special astronomy cameras. They can be used on an astrograph. Some photographers also use a black and white image sensor, which has certain advantages in terms of sensitivity compared to a color sensor. An equatorial mount can also help to balance out the effects of the earth's rotation. In addition, bright lenses or telescopes connected via adapters are a decisive advantage. The brighter the optics, the sharper the images. For digital post-processing the use of z. B. 14-bit RAW files are recommended, for example, to take advantage of noise reduction options and to take advantage of the lowest possible file compression. A laptop can be used to assess the sharpness of the image (via cable or radio). White balance to daylight is also to be considered.

Location and preparations

Typically, space photography is characterized by low light conditions. In relation to the light intensity of the objects, this is often the greatest challenge. Because of the light emissions, the location of the photographer is as dark as possible. So it should be a clear, dust-free night and preferably still a new moon, because the light of the moon can be disruptive unless you choose the moon itself as the object. Air particles can also play a role, which often results in ideal locations on mountains. The months around the longest night on December 21, i.e. from September to March, are ideal. In practice it makes sense to have a light source with you to prepare for recordings, because it is maximally dark. Warm clothing is a result of the time of year and the long time the photographer spends outdoors, because it takes a lot of time to prepare for a shot.

Advance information about the rising and setting times of the sun and moon, as well as the current star constellations , is also helpful.

Challenges

Long exposure times are therefore necessarily the rule with a tendency towards noise. With modern digital cameras, this is compensated for by higher ISO values (sensor sensitivity), which are usually between ISO 800 and ISO 3,200.

Nevertheless, a number of negative effects can occur:

  • Noise caused by long exposure times and / or image sensors with low sensitivity.
  • Graininess caused by high ISO values ​​(e.g. beyond ISO 3,200).
  • Background noise caused by bright pixels that can be mistaken for stars
  • unfavorable signal / noise ratio
  • Light emissions from artificial lighting or moonlight as disturbance variables
  • Blooming in corners of the image is caused by amplifier components located close to the image sensor, specifically their waste heat
  • Rotation of the earth, which should be compensated for with very long exposures, provided one is aiming for sharp, clear images.

Human factor

In general, one must also see human vision as a limitation. Due to the structure of the eyes, humans can only see very faint, small and almost colorless objects in space. The optics of the camera can therefore depict significantly more than a human eye. Conversely, this means that space photography can photograph many details that humans cannot see.

Photographers

Due to its low economic importance, only a few professional photographers are likely to work in this genre. The photographers come mainly from the following groups:

reception

Images of space photography are part of the scientific work u. a. in astronomy and earth sciences. But it also shapes people's view of their planet, the earth or a feeling for the dimensions of the surrounding space, the universe. Space photography also promotes a classification of individual existence, is part of environmental photography and leads to extraterrestrial projects of humanity.

Panoramas as examples

and display information about the image
Panorama of the lunar surface taken during the Apollo 17 mission (Station 1 East) (1972). composed of 24 single images: AS17-134-20408 to AS17-134-20431.

Web links

Commons : Space Photography  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : Hubble Space Telescope  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : Hubble images  - collection of images, videos and audio files

See also

literature

Technical literature

  • Katja Seidel: Astrophotography: Spectacular images without special equipment , Rheinwerk Photography, 2019, ISBN 978-3836270908
  • Thierry Legault: Astrophotography: From the right equipment to the perfect photo , 2nd edition, Dpunkt Verlag, 2019, ISBN 978-3864906626
  • Alexander Kerste: Astrophotography for Beginners: The Guide from the First Milky Way Images to Deep Sky Photography , Dpunkt Verlag, 2019, ISBN 978-3864906305
  • Glenn Randall: The Sky at Night: Landscape Photography after Sunset - Star Trails, Milky Way and Northern Lights, Dpunkt Verlag, 2018, ISBN 978-3864905827
  • Lance Keimig: Night photography and light painting: long exposures, astro-landscape photography, image processing, painting and drawing with light , Dpunkt Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3864903823

Literature on celestial objects

Space literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lynn Jenner: A Look at the Numbers as Hubble Space Telescope Enters its 25th Year. April 29, 2015, accessed January 10, 2020 .
  2. ↑ DER SPIEGEL: Science Pictures 2010: "Hubble" surpasses itself - DER SPIEGEL - Science. Retrieved January 10, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Charlotte Jee: This Hubble photo captures more than 265,000 galaxies in one image. MIT Technology Review, May 13, 2019, accessed January 10, 2020 (American English).
  4. ↑ Andrew Chaikin: Who Took the Legendary Earthrise Photo From Apollo 8? In: The Smithsonian Institution (Ed.): Smithsonian Magazine . tape 2018 , January, January 2018, ISSN  0037-7333 (American English, Who Took the Legendary Earthrise Photo From Apollo 8? [Accessed January 19, 2019]).
  5. ↑ The Sciences, November / December 1998. ( PDF ) In: The Sciences, November / December 1998. nyas.org, pp. 16-18 , archived from the original on September 28, 2006 ; accessed on October 8, 2018 . The Sciences, November / December 1998 ( Memento of September 28, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), pp. 16-18
  6. ↑ Zimmermann: Genesis. The Story of Apollo 8 . P. 171
  7. ↑ Apollo Image Atlas - AS08-14-2383 . 2012 from lpi.usra.edu, accessed October 8, 2018
  8. ↑ Earthrise - The Most Influential Images of All Time , 100photos.time.com, accessed November 22, 2018
  9. ↑ Jana Bruggmann: Space photos: The earth has risen . In: The time . June 1, 2019, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed January 10, 2020]).
  10. ↑ a b c d Editorial staff: One small click - large images. In: https://www.profifoto.de/ . Profi photo, July 19, 2019, accessed on January 8, 2020 (German).
  11. ↑ a b c Phill Parker: Apollo 11 Hasselblad Cameras. Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, 1969, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  12. ↑ a b Apollo 11 Mission Photography. Retrieved January 8, 2020 .
  13. ↑ 50 Years on the Moon. Retrieved January 3, 2020 (German).
  14. ↑ hasseblad in space. Retrieved January 3, 2020 (American English).
  15. ↑ Nick Allen: Neil Armstrong's widow discovers moon camera in cupboard (en-GB) . In: Daily Telegraph , February 9, 2015. Retrieved July 19, 2019. 
  16. ↑ Eric Jones, Ulli Lotzmann, Ken Glover, Allan Needell: Lunar Surface Flown Apollo 11 Artifacts From the Neil Armstrong Estate . January 6, 2016. Accessed July 19, 2019.
  17. ↑ WORLD: Neil Armstrong discovered moon landing camera in the closet . February 10, 2015 ( welt.de [accessed January 8, 2020]).
  18. ↑ Sensational find: Neil Armstrong's widow discovers secret souvenirs - ingenieur.de. February 11, 2015, accessed on January 3, 2020 (German).
  19. ↑ The Armstrong Purse: Flown Apollo 11 Lunar Artifacts ( en ) February 6, 2015. Accessed July 19, 2019.
  20. ↑ dpa: moon landing: original recordings will probably remain lost forever . In: The time . July 17, 2009, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed January 8, 2020]).
  21. ^ Nasa website. Retrieved November 10, 2013 .
  22. ↑ a b NASA: Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot. In: NASA Science. NASA, February 5, 2019, accessed January 10, 2020 .
  23. ↑ a b Simon Hadler: How to photograph the universe. In: https://orf.at/v . ORF, April 10, 2014, accessed on January 10, 2020 .
  24. ↑ a b c Wolfgang Greber: Space Photography: So that's where we live! Retrieved January 10, 2020 .
  25. ↑ a b Stefan Bubeck: 140,000 space photos and videos: NASA has put a gigantic media archive online. In: https://www.giga.de/ . April 11, 2017, accessed January 10, 2020 .
  26. ↑ Massive: The largest space photo of all time has 46 billion pixels and is 194 GB in size. Retrieved January 10, 2020 .
  27. ↑ Record recording of the Milky Way - ingenieur.de. October 22, 2015, accessed on January 10, 2020 (German).
  28. ↑ a b c d e Editor: Astrophotography. In: https://www.nikonimgsupport.com/ . Nikon, October 7, 2016, accessed January 10, 2020 .
  29. ↑ a b Editor: Into the depths of space - cooled CCD cameras in deep sky photography. In: Adventure Astronomy. November 10, 2017, accessed on January 10, 2020 (German).