The Ansel Adams of the Sky

he Orion Nebula, M42, is a hot,

violent place, says David F. Malin, arguably the best-known astrophotographer in the world today, from
his office at the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) in Siding Spring, New South
Wales. It has a Dantes Inferno feel to it.
One of the most beautiful sights in the
night sky, M42 is also one of the most
challenging to photograph. It has a lot of
detail that doesnt appear in ordinary
images, Malin explains. It gives you a
hint about the complex, three-dimensional structure of the nebula. It is Malins careful attention to that extra level
of exquisite detail that separates his work
from the ordinary. In addition to many
books, his photographs have graced virtually every major astronomical magazine published in the last 10 years, including this one see Icko Ibens article
starting on page 36.
I wish Id been into astronomy 10
years earlier, Malin says. With the rise of

CCDs, the 1970s were the beginning of

the twilight years for astrophotography.
But that is the decade that brought
Malin to the sky. Although he had a
strong general interest in science and
technology from his youth, he ventured
into the world of astronomy as a complete novice. I thought right ascension,
he chimes, was a religious group!
Malins early interest was chemistry,
not astronomy. Born in England in 1941,
his first major scientific experience was
with the chemical firm Ciba-Geigy,
where he ran a section concerned with
microscopic observations. I studied the
way chemical changes happened on
small scales and recorded the results
photographically, he notes. This was the
start of his lifelong passion for imaging.
By the early 1960s, Bart Bok, the great
Milky Way astronomer, had convinced the
Australian government of the need for a
world-class telescope in the Southern
Hemisphere. The result was the AAOs

ANGLO-AUSTRALIAN TELESCOPE BOARD

COPYRIGHT 1992, ANGLO-AUSTRALIAN TELESCOPE BOARD

star trails By David H. Levy

3.9-meter telescope. Malin was hired as

photographic scientist-astronomer for the
new observatory. Shortly after the facility
opened in 1975, Malin arrived with his
wife, Phillipa, son, James (now 26), and
twins, Sara and Jenny (now 24).
Having the responsibility for setting up
darkroom facilities at the observatorys
Sydney laboratory (where he spends most
of his time) and at the telescope site in
the outback 480 kilometers away, Malin
brought to his work a zest for developing
entirely new techniques in astrophotography. By 1979 he had invented an entirely
new process called photographic amplification. By contact-printing the original
plate with a diffuse light source instead of
a distant point-light source, he was able
to bring out details in objects that ordinary exposures couldnt record. Malin
applies the amplification process mainly
to black-and-white photography, which
he finds artistically more stimulating
than color.
With black-and-white, the photographer has more control over the process
than with color, he says. You can create
the image in the darkroom. With color, all
you can do is record the image. Malins
current scientific effort is compiling an
atlas of nearby bright galaxies like the magnificent M83 in Hydra. Each image will be
the mosaic of many individual plates.
Malin builds his images like a celestial
Ansel Adams, who brought the natural
world into the darkroom and emerged
with stunning works of art. While Adamss work focused mainly on various
landforms, he also used the sky to enhance the landscape, like his famous picture Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico
(S&T: November 1991, page 480). Malin
uses the giant Anglo-Australian telescope
to capture the sky, object by object.
There is a difference: Adams could

Above: Among the myriad deep-sky gems recorded by world-renowned astrophotographer

David Malin with the Anglo-Australian Observatorys 3.9-meter reflector, perhaps none is more
surreal than this portrait of CG 4, a cometlike molecular cloud 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Puppis. The nebulas head, which spans roughly 112 light-years, seems ready to devour the vastly more distant edge-on galaxy to its left (S&T: July 1993, page 36). Right: Malin
seated inside the prime-focus cage of the 3.9-meter reflector while the telescope is pointed low
toward the northern horizon.

1997 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope December 1997

85

Advertisement

move his camera, positioning it to capture the right scene at the right time of
day and in the right weather. For a celestial shooter like Malin, the spinning
Earth is his camera mount. In fact, he
did not take the originals of any of the
UK Schmidt plates he uses and has never
actually observed with that telescope. Instead, he makes photographs in the darkroom from plates that other people have
exposed. With the mighty Anglo-Australian telescope, however, Malin himself
exposed most of the images he uses.
For Malin, like Adams, the creative
process reaches its peak in the darkroom.
The creation of an image is the technical
challenge, he says, and much of it is
done in the laboratory before and after
the telescope exposure, manipulating the
resulting black-and-white images to extract the most information. Malins goal
is to build an image so that it expresses
something meaningful to him without
distorting the subjects relationship to the
natural world. To obtain his vivid colors,
Malin combines three separate black-andwhite images taken through red, green,
and blue filters. He then combines them
to a positive film in the darkroom to produce a true-color image.
Another aspect of Malins creativeness
explores subtle features within the
brighter parts of an image. To do this,
Malin perfected the technique of unsharp
masking, a darkroom process that reveals
delicate, low-contrast structures. He first
makes a slightly out-of-focus positivefilm copy and then aligns the copy precisely with the original. In the resulting
print, subtle features stand out without
overexposing the brighter regions.
The public side of Malins life includes
a hectic schedule of up to 50 public lectures a year. I consider this time well
spent, he admits. It is important for astronomers to tell about what they do,
why they do it, and what they learn.
Aware that in the paranoid age we live
in, some people see science as a threat,
Malin feels that it is very important to
see science as a liberating, nonthreatening force. With his magnificent photographs now on display in two international exhibitions and in books and
magazines worldwide, Malin has gone a
long way to liberating science.
In his photographic search for comets, author
David Levy has also taken hundreds of exposures using Schmidt cameras from 8 to 18
inches in aperture.

86

December 1997 Sky & Telescope

1997 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.