EVAN KRAMER: I like to think of astrophotography as a subset
of general night photography.
In night photography, usually, you use long exposures
on your camera to gather as many photons from a scene
as you can possibly collect.
In doing so, you can uncover what
your eyes may not necessarily be able to see in the scene.
Astrophotography is basically using those techniques,
but pointing the camera at the sky
to uncover the beauties of the cosmos.
Typically, astrophotographers like
to drive really far out into fields and get under dark skies
with a background of very little light pollution
and do astrophotography there.
Urban astrophotography is really unique
and I've really come to love doing it,
maybe even more than regular dark sky astrophotography
since I came to MIT.
While shooting at MIT does have its drawbacks
in terms of the added light pollution,
I absolutely love shooting here.
It's the added dynamic of shooting in a city environment
with the beautiful campus in the foreground that really makes
the challenge of not only capturing beautiful night sky
imagery, but also pairing it in a complimentary manner
with a city environment that is a true passion of mine.
When I was 12 years old, my parents took me on a vacation
to Arizona and we visited Kitt Peak National Observatory
just outside of Tucson.
And I remember how miserably cold and windy it was that day,
but we were getting a tour of the various telescopes
by an astronomer.
And the thought of staying up all night
capturing images of things people
had never seen before really captivated me
in a way I had never been captivated before.
From that point on, I read book after book
on astronomy, astrophysics, then even astrophotography,
and pretty soon, I got my first telescope,
a deep blue 90-millimeter refractor my sophomore year
of high school.
And I remember staying out late at night
observing the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn,
craters on the Moon.
And I would go into school the next day
and tell my friends how excited I
was that I was looking at these things,
and every response I would get would
be dull and disinterested.
And at that moment, I realized that I
needed a more effective way to communicate
my excitement with them.
So that's when I decided I needed to get a camera.
Originally, I thought I wanted to be an astronomer because I
loved looking at things in the night sky,
but quickly, I realized that I mostly
enjoyed making the instruments that enable
one to observe the night sky.
And that really came when I started doing astrophotography
because there are so many technical modifications you can
do to the camera that enables you to see more and see
more detail of the night sky.
So instead of being an astronomer,
I realized that maybe aerospace engineering
was the right thing for me, making
the instruments, building things that
really enable one to see further and advance space exploration.
So here at MIT, I'm a graduate student
in the Space Systems Lab working on a unique space telescope
concept.
This concept uses a rectangular strip mirror
instead of a traditional circular mirror.
If you spin this rectangle about its optical axis
and take a sequence of images as you spin,
you can use post-processing algorithms
to reconstruct the same image you would
get with a traditional circular aperture,
and you can actually get higher resolution
using this rectangular aperture system.
Now, the challenge with these telescopes
is that they have to spin at a very precisely controlled rate,
as well as track the target that they're imaging
as they fly over in orbit.
So at MIT, we're building a hardware
testbed to demonstrate that we can control
the pointing of a rotating synthetic aperture
system to the degree at which we need.
So while I'll never trade my love for using telescopes
on the ground to look at things in the sky,
the opportunity to work on telescopes that go into space
is something that I wouldn't trade either.
I always have many ideas for new projects floating around
in my head.
Being at a place like MIT, I feel like I'm not
bounded in any way.
My creativity is always supported
by facilities managers and content
creators who encourage me to continue
to test the boundaries of what's possible
in urban astrophotography.
[MUSIC PLAYING]