Photographing and Printing the Cosmos
While they spent much of their time studying the moon, and the planets and their satellites, astronomers at the Lick were particularly concerned with photographing objects beyond our solar system, like nebulae, galaxies, and comets. At the time, any distant structure of stars and gas was referred to as a "nebula"; many of these objects are now identified as galaxies. This exhibit features photographic images of these distant objects.
The telescopic and photographic technology available to astronomers at the time had many limitations in comparison with today's technologies. Though observer's tried to very carefully guide the telescope throughout the night in order to follow the object under observation, the resulting images were often blurry or, as Barnard put it in one essay, "ragged." The process of guiding the telescope was especially tricky in the case of comets. Another major limitation was the exposure time necessary to capture the light of celestial objects--this was particularly true for the most distant objects. In an early reflection on the merits of astrophotography, Charles Perrine discusses the difficulty of capturing these objects. These sentiments are echoed in .
These images tell a story, then, about how difficult it was for astronomers to create these images of the cosmos, speaking to a certain intensity of labor on the part of the individual astronomer and the technicians that would assist him in the process; but they also archive another story about how aesthetic expectations and concerns conditioned both the way the images were created and the way they were reproduced as prints.
Turning these glass plates into
