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Reading Nature, Observing Science: Examining Material Practices in the Lick Observatory Archives and Kenneth S. Norris Papers

Creating the Images

The biggest challenge to producing images of the cosmos with the Great Lick Refractor and the Crossley telescope was the mechanics of guiding these very large telescopes. In his copybook, Charles Perrine wrote an early reflection on the merits of astrophotography, one page of which is displayed in the gallery above. He discusses the difficulty of capturing the light of nebulae, noting that the action of guiding the telescope often resulted in the loss of structural detail. To see the full article, click here. Barnard also discusses the difficulty of capturing light and the labor of the photographic process in his 1913 book Photographs of the Milky Way and of Comets.

Most of the images produced at the Lick were recorded as negatives on glass plates coated with photosensitive chemicals. After working through the night, astronomers often continued to work into the morning, developing the negatives they had created. They often found that the images were overexposed, underexposed, or blurry. Part of the drive toward objectivity at the Lick involved mechanization in order to reduce contact between the human and the telescope; astronomers quickly developed new technologies to automate the telescope's movement throughout the night.

We have in this archive only a few of the thousands of images created by Lick astronomers, as many were rejected. Many of the original glass negatives created with the telescopes are still housed on the grounds of the Lick Observatory.

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"On chilly or cold nights I wore an Esquimaux coat made of reindeer skin, and heavy rubber overshoes. Frequently, on bringing the eye to the telescope on such nights, a spark would discharge with a slight shock between the eye and the eyepiece. This was extremely annoying, and finally became so disagreeable that it was found convenient frequently to touch the metal of the instrument...the probable explanation of this phenomenon is that it is due to the fur coat and the insulation of the rubber overshoes, the body becoming electrically charged like a Leyden jar." - Barnard in "Photographs of the Milky Way and Comets," 1913
Three-hour exposure. Reflecting on this photograph in a publication titled "On the Photographs of the Milky Way at the Lick Observatory in 1889," Barnard writes, "This remarkable picture shows the cloud-like forms like waves of spray. A curving lane of darkness runs from the lower left-hand portion of the picture and curves gracefully upwards to the place of Jupiter. It is singularly like the stem of a great leaf. At the middle of the picture it is seen to pass behind some of the clouds of stars and emerge beyond, showing us clearly which part of the Milky Way at that point is nearest to us... "
This is a four-hour exposure of the Great Spiral Nebula using the 36" Crossley reflector. Note the loss of detail described by Perrine or "faint nebulosity" described in the letters here; compare with the image of the spiral galaxy from 1914. N.B.: This is now known as the Whirlpool Galaxy. Astronomers did not yet understand the difference between nebulae and galaxies, believing that they were of the same nature. Most thought that all of these distant structures were contained within the Milky Way galaxy itself. The difference was confirmed in the 1920s; the work of one of the Lick's astronomers, Heber Curtis, contributed in part to this development.