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

Creating the Images

In his copybook, astronomer Charles D. Perrine wrote an early reflection on 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. Edward Barnard, pictured here wearing his "Esquimaux coat" to stay warm in the late hours of the night, also discusses the labor of the photographic process in his 1913 book Photographs of the Milky Way and of Comets. He notes that the light of comets was especially difficult to capture, their tails often appearing "ragged" in the images due to the motion of the telescope.

Most of the images produced at the Lick were recorded on glass plates coated with photosensitive chemicals. They were created as positives or negatives depending on the emulsion process in use. After working through the night to expose the plates, astronomers often continued to work into the morning to develop the images. They often found that the hours they spent at the telescope had been wasted: the exposure time had been too short or too long, or the telescope had not been guided carefully enough. Part of the drive toward creating more "objective" images involved reducing human contact with the telescopes by automating the guiding process.

In the gallery above, we present images that are perhaps less visually stunning than others available in the archive, but that speak to this labor, as well as the material limitations of the camera for capturing detail and light. Astronomers at the Lick created thousands of images, but as many were rejected along these lines, the archives in UCSC Special Collections contain relatively few images. Additionally, many of the original glass negatives are still housed on the grounds of the Lick Observatory.

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Transcription: "The exposure necessary to bring out the structure of faint nebulae are very long, often of three and four hours duration and for some special objects, ten or twelve hours. These long exposures are attended with difficulties, many of which would disappear if the necessary light action could be secured in one or two hours...the negatives secured with shorter exposure would be of greater excellence and would show structure that is now lost to thinning due to difficulties of guiding [the telescope] during very long exposures."
"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.