Author Archives: Thor

Kinnikinnik

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Kinnikinnik
Kinnikinnik Lake near Flagstaff AZ, 14 Nov 1998
24mm Olympus lens at f/4, 2 hours on Fuji 800 Superia

There is a progression of techniques in taking pictures of the night sky. The simplest is to place your camera on a tripod and open the shutter for a while. The stars form streaks on the film as the Earth rotates under them, creating a startrail image. As I considered what I would need to take more advanced astrophotos, I found that there is plenty to learn and much opportunity for pleasing compositions even with this simple method.

I pondered how to capture that feeling I once shared with a friend seeing the stars from zenith to horizon, then continuing beneath us as we looked out over their reflections in an alpine lake. This became the inspiration for my quest of the ultimate startrail picture: a full semicircle of startrails reflected in the calm waters of a lake. I have not achieved this goal, but the pictures in this series are some of the rewards along the way.

Kinnikinnik is the closest I came to making my target image! The conditions were perfect: a clear dark sky, no aurora, a calm lake with no creatures disturbing it, but my timing is off. This is my first and only time at this site and I arrived late after a day of traveling. I was unprepared to last the night, and after a few one and two hour trial exposures, I succumbed to the cold and returned to my distant hotel room to recharge. I never made it back.

Although not successful that year, I am looking forward to more adventures in future years. In a way, I hope I never quite find full success in this project!

Northern Six-Hour Exposure

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Northern Six-Hour Exposure
Boundary Waters Canoe Area, MN, 23 Oct 1998
24mm Olympus lens at f/8, 6 hour exposure on Fuji 800 Superia
Photo by John Walsh

To find truly dark skies, go north. My friend John Walsh, an avid backpacker, headed to the northernmost part of our state for a fall weekend adventure. I convinced him to take my camera and film, explained how to attach chemical handwarmers to the lens to keep it from fogging over, and asked him to open the shutter for six hours when he got there. Among his other nice photos of aurora and bright stars, is this beautiful picture across a gently flowing stream, reflecting the night sky and the northern lights.

Beaver Trails

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Beaver Trails
Swamp Lake, north of Mille Lacs MN, 21 Oct 1998
20mm Nikon lens at f/8, 6 hour exposure on Fuji Super-G

This night had brought together nearly all the elements for my target picture:  a lake far away from city lights and radio towers, one with no cabins or roads on the north while I had access from the south, a long night to contain a long exposure without the lake being already frozen, a stagnant high pressure center stalling the winds and keeping the lake surface at a mirror finish.  And my schedule had allowed me to take a night away to make the shot!  All these prerequisites had been met.

I set up my equipment and busied myself with other activities while the camera recorded the motion of the sky.  A loud KERSPLASH startled me.  Who would be throwing boulders into the lake in the middle of the night?  I peered out onto the lake to see dark shadows swimming back and forth directly in front of my camera.  Each traversal left a wake breaking up the reflected starlight.  Occasionally a shadow would suddenly turn over end and dive, slapping its tail onto the water surface to make the boulder-throwing sound.

I cursed the beavers.  They filled the night with constant gnawing sounds as they busied themselves around me.  About halfway through the night I was startled again, this time by the sound of a tree crashing to the forest floor next to me.  One more hazard to add to my list.

The picture I obtained was almost perfect, accented by the glow of the northern lights, and the intermittent breaks in the reflected trails as the beavers swam across the view, oblivious to my intent.

Four-Hour Lodgepoles

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Four-Hour Lodgepoles
Lake Louise Campground, Banff Park, Alberta Canada, 12:00am 19 Aug 1998
20mm Nikon lens at f/8, 4 hour exposure on E200 Ektachrome processed +2 stops (ISO 800)

Think about lying on your back as a child watching clouds drifting past. This is the nighttime equivalent. The stars etch a trail on the film as they follow their course through the night.  The different temperatures of stars show as different colors, the cooler stars glow a warm orange, the hottest stars are a bright blue.

Banff Poles

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Banff Poles 
Tunnel Mountain Campground, Banff Park, Alberta Canada, 17 Aug 1998 10:40pm
20mm f/4 Nikon lens, 1 hour exposure on E200 Ektachrome processed +2 stops (ISO 800)

While camping trips make great venues for photographing the sky, sometimes it is difficult to get a full view of it. But here is an opening in the canopy, the lodgepole pines framing the pole star. The camera was aimed at Polaris, and the shutter opened for an hour. The flickering campfires and lamps illuminated the boughs of the trees. 

A startrail picture like this is a powerful illustration of the Earth’s motion. The pole star shows almost no motion. The others show longer arcs the further away, but all of them make an equal arc: a one-hour exposure cuts 1/24th of a full circle.

Csuri Exhibit Poster

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“Gossip”, by Charles A Csuri, 1990.

When we consider the impact of computer graphics we usually think of Hollywood motion picture special-effects, or beautifully crafted images and commercials from high-end marketing firms, which both seem like products of the east and west coasts.  We don’t think of midwestern artists or public university departments as being part of that world.  Yet this is exactly where much of the pioneering work in computer graphics was done and its commercialization was born.

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The Burn-Hole Club

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The coils that provide the magnetic force to move the electron beam

Cathode ray tubes are a remarkable technology that incorporate many seemingly magic principles of physics.  Thermionic emission causes electrons to “boil” off a cathode, high voltage electric fields accelerate and focus them, and magnetic fields steer them to the anode screen where they energize phosphor molecules, which then re-release that energy as visible light!

While developing the electronics to control the CRT and make all this magic happen, we often had to “bring up the spot”, showing the electron beam in one static location, where it could be examined visually and measured with various instruments. 

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Cathode Rays

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The 100th anniversary of the cathode ray tube.

This is the first of three posts describing a now-(nearly)-obsolete technology.

Thomas Edison nearly discovered them.  In his experiments with heated filaments in evacuated glass bulbs trying to find a suitable incandescent lamp, there were hints.  He noticed depositions of material on the walls of the glass tubes.  Many scientific discoveries are preceded not by the expression “Eureka”, but instead by the comment: “Hmm, that’s funny”.  If he had followed up on this odd result, he might have also invented the vacuum tube amplifier.

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Retirement Inauguration

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The logo for a project called Mongoose, an early system that was able to compute and send images to color copiers and printers.

Today was my last day of employment, and I will now be exchanging the two major foci of my creative time. 

My interests in photography and astronomy and art was always secondary to my full-time work as a color scientist, an occupation that has provided a long and fulfilling career. 

But this particular outcome was something of a fluke; the education I pursued was a hodge-podge of art, science, and engineering, and my early career was filled with jobs at not-quite-successful entrepreneurial startups that caused my dad to inquire where I was working next, because he wanted to avoid investing there!

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