Hi everyone! This is Nico from the Advanced Imaging Conference in San Jose and I got to sit
down here with Adam Block, an astrophotographer, for a little bit here and why don't you just
introduce yourself Adam. So, I'm Adam Block. I'm an astrophotographer. I'm also an instructor in
astrophotography. I create instructional videos that show people how to put together the data.
And I work at the University of Arizona into the department of astronomy doing some research
there. So that's basically what I do. Adam gave a presentation called beauty and the beholder for
the Astro Imaging Channel which is a weekly talk show on youtube all about astrophotography and
that presentation really stuck with me. You recommended a number of books, you showed
a number of your astro photographs and one thing that I wanted to ask you about it was this concept
of pre-visualization and specifically where in the process for you pre-visualization
arises? There are some kinds of objects that you would take pictures of where they're well-known
objects so you might visualize that. Boy I would really like to take a picture of that!
It could be a spiral galaxy or some well-known nebula and you already have in your mind's eye
what the ideal version of that is hanging up on your wall or something that you could in some
way maybe share with other people, right. But I think the other form comes a little later, where
it might be an object that there might not be very many good pictures of or something that
you haven't worked on before where you don't really have an idea until you look at the data
and you actually examine it once it's in your hands, because there is more
information contained in the data that you can display on the screen at any one time, so just
by manipulating the screen stretch and starting that process of looking at what you've captured
that informs this previous pre-visualization. Of the kind of contrast you might want in the final
image the kind of details, the things you need to mitigate like the noise, stuff like that. And
this I feel is what uh Ansel Adams would do, the father of pre-visualization, when he would stare
through his camera at some scene he was already thinking about what he was going to dodge and burn
in his laboratory just by being out there in the field and looking at the raw data, if you will.
Yeah, so speaking of Ansel Adams, do you find inspiration in art outside of astrophotography
that then is directly related to maybe choices you make when you're processing astro photographs. I
think the answer is yes but it's in a surprisingly different way. One of the things that I do as a
as a communicator, and a public outreach kind of person, popularizer of astronomy is that I'm
always thinking of a way to present an image that offers a perspective and art does that. Right, art
does that by deconstructing things or displaying things or expressing things in a different way
that makes the viewer approach the view or think about things in a different way than
you might otherwise do, and I do the same thing in terms of astrophotography. So, for example,
there was a slide that was shown at the end of the presentation that we saw here today by Dr. Plait
which was a picture I took of Betelgeuse one of the brightest stars in the sky now who would
ever stare at Betelgeuse for three hours and just get an RGB image of it just to see what's there.
Right? I thought that was a cool idea. I consider that idea just about as good as the final
the picture is. I mean it's a nice picture, but I think the idea is what really stands out in that
picture and I hope that a viewer would think: Wow! No, I've never actually seen what are the
things that are near Betelgeuse because it's so bright. Astrophotographers avoid bright stars;
they don't go take pictures of them! So, that would be an example where. Like sort of being,
straddling professional astronomy and amateur astrophotography, is there anything in the
professional realm you think is going to trickle down? There are always things that seem to trickle
down. There's some technical stuff you know in the in the days uh that I recall. For example,
deconvolution right so that's the obvious example where uh Hubble Space Telescope was
producing fuzzy images or you had the atmosphere producing fuzzy images from above looking down
uh there has been this concerted effort to try to do signal processing to make them clearer
well that trickles down to software that we all love and use to sharpen our images right but I
think that there's there's other things you know professional astronomers have the same challenge
when it comes to showing the public what they're doing and there are many clever people that come
up with interesting ways of doing that. And with my little radar I'm always on the lookout for
how other people choose to express that information or make it publicly available so
yeah I look for that as well. One thing you showed in your talk last night was that
the air glow in the red spectrum is really really bright! [Adam]: It's really bright,
but we don't sense it. [Nico]: Yeah so, so yeah I mean I know there's other limitations to shooting
infrared from earth, but is that one of the major ones? That is a big one. There are certain bands
that if you look in that the air glow is just so bright you gotta you know block it yeah yeah and
then there's other windows where the atmosphere literally absorbs the light of that wavelength
and so there are small little windows where certain wavelengths come through and others don't
with water vapor and things like that so yeah it gets kind of weird when you start
looking at these other wavelengths how the the atmosphere affects what we see it just
happens to be well it's not by chance but it is transparent at the wavelengths that we are
that we enjoy with our eyesight. On the topic of wavelengths: when you're reading like academic
papers on objects are there any wavelengths that a professional astronomer would capture
that gives you a hint about something that may be visible in the visible spectrum? I think the funny
thing is that when you look at a lot of the papers they tend not to have very good pictures! I mean
right! So it isn't so much you know the science that they're doing may or may not inform how
interesting the object might be to photograph, but sometimes you can find hints at things because
there are papers for example where one of the areas of interest is to find stellar streams
around other galaxies and if you look at some old papers there are hints in some of these old papers
because they're you know people study galaxies take survey images of galaxies all the time.
The star streams were there, but they were just so noisy I mean no one would ever think that that
was a you know a feature that was a something to go after. They just didn't have the sensitivity
and it wasn't something they were looking at right they looked at the same galaxies,
but later this study became something that was more significant and important so you take these
deep exposures that can even be done with modest equipment
and now you're detecting stellar streams around other galaxies which speaks to something about
cosmological evolution of the universe. That's cool! That's a great pro-am kind of
connective tissue! When you're thinking of the story of an image are you thinking in terms of
just the image? Or are you also thinking in terms of: "and I could verbally explain this
based on the image?" do you get what i'm getting at? I do, um, I think for me the
the story is often a perspective, it's what I'm trying to show. So, it isn't necessarily
something that would necessarily need to be put into words. Sometimes it helps, but
a lot of what an image communicates can be part of the physics of what's going on. So, as an example,
when you show edge-on spiral galaxies. Right, if you process the edge-on spiral galaxy you can
make the dust lanes show up very well but there might be more to it than that. In the sense that
if you apply too much contrast those dust lanes become very opaque and difficult. If
you don't sense that there's light coming through where there is an attenuation of light
of all the stars that are in the galaxy those that light shines through. Right? So,
part of the story I want to tell is that feature as well that informs the steps that
I'm going to do when I do my image processing is that there may be a perspective here that
that I want to express that I want to be sure that the data you know shows me or displays in some way
and that's the story even even without words I think that that's part of a story. That there's
a certain naturalness I think in that and that's kind of a style that I um, that i've generally
done with my images through time. And it's that kind of thought process I think that I use.
I'm going to mention a very unnatural photo you showed in your presentation where you put the
the full moon with Andromeda galaxy taken on the same night. [Adam]: Very true! [Nico]: Are
you worried at all that if that photo circulates on the internet without the context that people
will get the wrong impression? Of course, yeah! However I was not the first to make that photo
the first of its type that became popular was done by um an astronomer at Manoao and its intent as
was mine was always to show a perspective and so the genesis of that particular kind of picture
was really another one of these perspectives is one of scale. It was this understanding of
you know these objects in the sky. They're so far removed from an understanding of how big they are,
how bright they are. I think they are all of that kind of stuff. So to put the moon a half a degree
thing next to the andromeda galaxy basically three and a half to four degree thing really offers some
mind-shaking moment of a perspective even though they don't naturally appear in the sky together,
because the moon is so bright, because they don't come near to one another. all of that kind
of stuff. It is a perspective that was worthy of the misinterpretation in this particular example?
Sure it was worthy because of its intent. Sort of related: What is your opinion on narrowband
imaging in general? I know that you do mostly most true color imaging. And I want to explain,
and I'd like to explain why. One of the reasons why is because you know through time
I was always administering these astrophotography programs as part of the public outreach that I did
and you know narrowband imaging takes an awful lot of time because you're looking at a a small amount
of light and you gotta expose for long periods of time so that was not amenable to any of the public
outreach that I did because you couldn't invest that. No one would pay for that amount of time or
spend that amount of time to somehow collect data just for you know those purposes. So broadband was
an obvious fit for the kind of imaging that I was doing in those programs. Nowadays there are other
sources that I can tap into: remote observing in Chile and other people's data that have
been kind enough to give me their data, things like that become other resources for me. And so
recently I've started to actually work with some narrowband data so I've never been opposed to it,
but it is something that is, there's a different approach I think and it certainly has more freedom
in the expression because the constraints are relaxed. I mean yeah there are no longer,
you know you can put things in one channel or another channel, you can manipulate the
contrast or the way in which you might deal with just true signal strengths. Right?
If you did that in broadband imaging you'd be weird! Yes because you could just make green
things but no yeah everybody but [Nico]: in narrowband imaging we usually boost the o3
quite a bit! [Adam]: Sure! [Nico]: because the Ha would just dominate all [Adam]: that's right!
But the story there then is really to highlight, perhaps the story I mean, it could be other
stories, but for me the story might be I want to highlight the physics of where the gas is. Right?
So and I think that that's generally the convention: is that you're going to
offer those intermediate colors or the striking colors where there is this differential in the
emission of the gas and so if the boosting of that signal is necessary to highlight those differences
to make that contrast? Yeah, that's fair game, that makes sense to me. So, I don't want to hold
you too long but I want you to tell people on my youtube about your educational efforts with
your website and courses. Oh! So, my site is called adamblockstudios.com and I really began
the work and study and learning of ccd imaging when it kind of just started
with amateur astronomy this would be in the you know the mid 1990s.
So in the course of this experience of working with cameras and then working with the data
I've had the opportunity to experience you know a whole set of different software programs
and then subsequently because of this experience you know create instructional content that helps
people to learn how to use the software and learn how to manipulate images and learn just more about
astronomy in general. So today my emphasis is on software programs like PixInsight that allows for
the creation of these beautiful astronomical images. It's a huge very sophisticated program
that offers many, many degrees of freedom and so it's ripe obviously for this instructional need to
explain how to really take advantage of it, like any other program like Photoshop has that same
kind of need although it's well covered today, but that one is not dedicated to astronomical
imaging where PixInsight is, so that's kind of the niche that i'm currently sitting in right now.