Figure 1 – NASA photograph from Voyager 2 of the planet Neptune from 2.8 billion miles from Earth.

Yesterday I spoke about the Philae comet lander.  It is 300 million miles from Earth, and it made me wonder what the farthest out photograph ever taken was.  Hmm, that sounds like pretty awkward English.  Question, what space photograph was taken farthest from Earth?  Ah, better!

On September 12, 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012. That statement alone gives me goose bumps.  But as for photographs, I’d like to start with Figure 1 which was actually taken by Voyager 2 of the planet Neptune at approximately 2.8 billion miles from Earth.  Quick calculation friends, that’s about ten times further out than Philae and its comet.  The Neptune image is so beautiful that I could not resist showing it.

But there are images from even further out! On February 14, 1990, at the suggestion of astronomer and fellow dreamer, Carl Sagan, NASA turned the cameras of Voyager 1 around and photographed all of the solar system from approximately 4 billion miles out.  I think that so far this is the “farthest out” photograph ever taken.  In this photograph planet Earth is a pale blue dot, a crescent 0.12 pixels wide.

On December 6, 2014 NASA will wake up its New Horizon’s space probe for the last time on its journey to Pluto and the Kuiper asteroids.  That rendezvous is scheduled for next July 14th.

Figure 2 – Carl Sagan’s “Pale blue dot,” the planet Earth from Voyager 1 taken from 4 billion miles from Earth on February 14, 1990 – the farthest out image. Image from NASA.

Figure 1 – Philae’s image from the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. (c) 2014 ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA

Sometimes you just know a historic image the moment that it is taken.  A prime example of that is Figure 1 from the European Space Agency, which was taken by the Philae probe at 300,000 million miles from Earth on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.  This is a photograph for the ages. As most people know by now the probe is currently in the sleep of essential battery failure due to lack of light.

So, a number of thoughts come to mind.  It is a truly amazing achievement.  We have gotten so used to such achievements that we forget just how difficult they are.  The physics and celestial mechanics that makes all this possible was developed by an impressive parade of great physicists, mathematicians, and astronomers: Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Isaac Newton (1643–1727), Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), Simon Newcomb (1835–1909), and Albert Einstein (1879–1955).   Kudos to them all!  But the required precision of steering is amazing.  Head the slightest bit off course and you miss by millions of miles.  Power is an issue.  The time delay is so large that all the final maneuvers need to be done automatically driven by sensors either on the probe or on the Rosetta mother craft.  Radio signals are so weak that sending back and receiving digital images is a tour de force.  You’re always fighting signal-to-noise.

But the biggest questions is why do it.  For those of us who truly believe that we are slowly but relentlessly freeing ourselves of the tethers that fetter us to Earth, it is a non question. We do it because it is hard, but when the third Fourth millenials will view it a thousand years from now in retrospect there will seem to be no question at all. But in our myopic, war and suffering filled world the value of reaching for the stars, of understanding the origins of life on Earth, seem eclipsed by everyday urgencies.

There are very few things that we do as a race that ennoble us, that point to an essential non-barbaric humanist curiosity. This may be the ultimate justification.  We can close our eyes and see the future. At the same time, we can look about and see the minions, the intellectual army of creators, of scientist and artists.  They are all dreamers – and therein lies mind spring that is the source of humanity.

First photograph of a solar eclipse July 18, 1851. From the Wikipediacommons and in the public domain.

Some of you are going to have the priveledge today of seeing a partial solar eclipse.  Unfortunately, those of us in New England have to be happy with the fall foliage this time.  The fall foliage is BTW being ripped from the trees by a violent noreaster – another New England phenomenon. This got me wondering the proverbial question, who was the first person to photograph a solar eclipse.  The honor appears, according to the Wikipedia, to go to daguerreotypist Berkowski who took the photograph of Figure 1 on July 28, 1851 at the Royal Observatory in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kalinigrad in Russia).

Now, I say appears because the Wikipedia entry for Berkowski contains the cryptic phrase “the first correctly exposed photograph of the solar corona,” suggesting that someone else tried first. A small 6 cm refracting telescope was attached to the 15.8 cm Fraunhofer heliometer and an 84-second exposure was taken shortly after the beginning of totality.

The problem with solar eclipses being that you don’t get retakes. I photographed one back in 1971.  It was amazing and what I remember is all the preparation and then nonstop shooting.  You have this desire to just look and say wow!

Solar eclipse are not however, mere curiosities.  The eclipse of 1919 was famous for the demonstration that light paths are bent in a gravitational field, in this case that of the Sun.  See Figure 2. This was a demonstration of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Figure 1 – From the report of Sir Arthur Eddington on the expedition to the island of Principe (off the west coast of Africa) – demonstrating the bending of light in a gravitational field. From the Wikipediacommons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Stereo image of Selina Gray and two of her daughters. (from the US National Park Service).

The United States National Park Service has unveiled a rare piece of Americana.  It has acquired, due to the attentive eye of a volunteer, who spotted the photograph of Figure 1 on an Ebay auction.  It is an image of Selina Gray.  Selina Gray was a slave on the estate owned by Robert E. Lee called Arlington House. At the start of the Civil War, when the Lee’s fled Arlington, Mrs. Lee entrusted  her personal slave, Selina Norris Gray, the keys to the mansion and put her in charge of protecting the great house.

Significantly, Lee’s wife was a descendant of George Washington’s wife Martha Custis. Marauding Union soldiers stole numerous heirlooms belonging to George Washington that were stored in the house. Gray confronted the soldiers demanding that they  not touch any of Mrs. Lee’s things. She then complained to Union Gen. Irvin McDowell, and it was McDowell who had the remaining artifacts shipped to the Patent Office for safekeeping and posterity.

Gray was freed in December 1862, a stipulation of the will of Mary Lee’s father. Ms. Gray and her family ultimately bought land near Arlington, growing and selling vegetables for a living.  She died in 1907.

As rare as it is to know the names of subjects in 19th century photographs; it is particularly rare when these people were slaves, who were considered merely the property of others.  The photograph is believed to have been taken outside the slave quarters at Arlington House.  The photograph, a stereo pair, was simply marked on the back as “Gen Lee’s Slaves Arlington Va,” but Park Service historians were able to identify Selina Gray from another photograph in their collection.  As ever the picture is a rare glimpse.  We contemplate the clothing for a moment.  But then we become haunted by the reality of what a terrible moment world it was for these people.

Lovers of the work of Vivian Maier will morn the loss last week of English Street photographer Shirley Baker. Happily Ms. Baker saw to the preservation of her own work. It didn’t need to be discovered in a trunk at auction.  Rather Ms. Baker, one of the leading British photographers of the past century donated her work to the Mary Evans Picture Library.

A significant.body of this work is a collection documenting Salford and Manchester. These images mostly from 1960 to 1973 a time of economic and social metamorphosis for the working class people of Manchester and Salford. And as such the work becomes an important historic documentation.

Ms. Baker had a keen sense of the lyrical in her images, juxtaposing, for instance, an elderly woman staring wistfully immutable on one side of a bench with two children in motion rough-housing on the other side. This simple image becomes a Shakespearian allegory of the “seven ages of life.” Then there is a wonderful image of a woman sitting oblivious to the huge great dane seated beside her.  And then a dog sitting in a train station stall with its legs crossed next to a woman with her legs crossed.

It is such a pleasure to study these wonderful images and to let them transport us back in time and place. It is one of those cases when even if you do not recognize the photographer, you recognize the photograph. And you recognize the love and respect for subject that you find in them. Study is the operational word here, because there is so much to learn about seeing and photographic composition in Shirley Baker’s life’s work.

Figure 1 – Edinburgh Ale, James Ballantine, Dr. George Bell, and David Octavious Hill, by Adamson and Hill (1843-1847). From The National Galleries of Scotland Commons via Flickr and the WikimediaCommons.

This past Thursday brought with it the historic vote by the Scottish people to remain joined to the United Kingdom.  It got me thinking. Scotland is an amazing and spectacular place.  And I was thinking about photographs from the nineteenth century.  This lead me to a Google search, and I found myself looking at some of the amazing calotypes of Adamson and Hill. Daguereotypes and calotypes were essentially invented simultaneously.  The crisp sharpness of the daguereotype contrasts with the soft sepia tones of the calotype made from paper negatives.

In1843 painter David Octavius Hill formed a partnership with engineer Robert Adamson, creating Scotland’s first photographic studio. Their partnership only lasted four years because of the untimely death of Adamson.  But in that brief period their association combined Hill’s artistic sensibity and understanding of composition and lighting with Adamson’s mastery of the scientific and engineering aspects of the craft.

Adamson and Hill produced produced approximately three thousand prints.  Photography evolved at the time from deep-rooted artistic traditions and such is the wonderful body of work that they have left us.  Images such as the scene from an Edinburgh bar in Figure 1 is not stiff portraiture, but rather is reminiscent of such similar scenes as Peter Bruegel’s “Peasant Dance.”  There are, in fact, many such classical paintings – a whole genre of paintings of beer drinking and carousing among all classes.

Watercolorist John Harden, upon first seeing Hill and Adamson’s work in 1843 wrote: “The pictures produced are as Rembrandt’s but improved, so like his style & the oldest & finest masters that doubtless a great progress in Portrait painting & effect must be the consequence.”

There is an interesting connection between Hill and the great Victorian physicist Sir David Brewster.  Hill was present at the Disruption Assembly in 1843 when over 450 ministers walked out of the Church of Scotland assembly and established the Free Church of Scotland. Hill wanted to accurately portray the event in a monumental painting.  Brewster suggested that Hill use photography to record the likenesses of all the ministers.  Brewster had himself experimented with photography, and it was he who introduced Hill to another photography enthusiast Robert Adamson.  The painting ( 5′ by 11.3′) was eventually completed in 1866.

As in so many of the masterpieces of the photographic Victorian age in the work of Adamson and Hill we catch a precious glimpse of how life was or how they wished us to perceive it – not necessarily the same thing, of course.  In Figure 2 we share through their lens a warm, tender, moody, and perhaps sleepy moment from so very long ago.

Figure2 – Harriet Farnie with Miss Farnie and a Sleeping Puppy by Adamson and Hill (1843-1847) from the Natuion Galleries of Scotland Commons via Flickr and the Wikimediacommons.

Figure 1- Photograph by astronaut Frank Culbertson from the International Space Station showing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. From NASA and in the public domain.

Thursday marked the thirteenth anniversary of the 9/11 Attack on the World Trade Center.  I came upon this amazing photograph of the event taken by then NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson. Culbertson was the only American not present on the planet that September day.  He was ~ 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth in the, then under construction, International Space Station with two Russian cosmonauts. He saw the huge column of smoke streaming from Lower Manhattan, where the Twin Towers fell and captured both video and still photographs of site from space for NASA.

Culbertson recalls his call to the ground that morning to give the results of some physical exams to his flight surgeon at Mission Control Houston, Steve Hart, and was told, “Frank, we’re not having a very good day down here on Earth.”

Culbertson saw that the space station was about to pass over New England. So he grabbed his camera and positioned himself to have a clear view of New York City. Later, Culbertson was also able to see the damage to the Pentagon. Ironically, his good friend and U.S. Naval Academy classmate Charles “Chic” Burlingame was the pilot of hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that struck the Pentagon.

“Every orbit we kept trying to see more of what was happening,” Culbertson said. “One of the most startling effects was that within about two orbits, all of the contrails that are normally crisscrossing the United States has disappeared because they had grounded all the airplanes and there was nobody else flying in U.S. airspace — except for one airplane that was leaving a contrail from the central U.S. toward Washington, and that was Air Force One headed back to D.C. with President Bush. It was a very sobering time for us.”

Figure 1 – The first publicaly shared mobile phone image. Transmitted on June 11, 1997 by Phillipe Kahn of his newborn daughter Sophie. From the Wikimedia Commons and put in the public domain by Phillipe Kahn.

It’s been a while since I posted a photographic first. But this week brought us the IPhone 6, the IPhone6 plus, and the IWatch and this got me thinking about the rapid, blink of the eye, history of both the mobile phone and the digital camera on the mobile phone.  For those of us brought up on Star Trek, it has all been wonderful, although the flip phone, which was designed to give you the feel of the Star Trek communicator had only a brief moment in the sun or some other star before we move on.  Indeed, even standard Federation of Planets communicator models evolved rapidly through the seasons of the show.  The flip communicator rapidly became integrated into the Federation medallion worn by crews.  Even the short lived “red shirts” wore them.  Oops! I am digressing again.

I found myself wondering this morning what the first mobile phone image was.  It sounded like the kind of thing that I could find with a simple Google Search, and sure enough.  On June 11, 1997, Philippe Kahn instantly transmitted what is widely believed to be the first publicly shared photographs ever.  In some sense it marks the birth of social media.  The image shown in Figure 1, fittingly is of his then newborn daughter Sophie from the maternity ward. It was shared simultaneously with a then amazing 2000 people.

Look at the picture and note its relatively low resolution.  Do a quick calculation.  It was taken a mere seventeen years ago.  The telephone was invented somewhere between 1833 and 1876 – don’t want to weigh in on a controversial issue.  Television was invented a half century later.  The current rate of innovation is truly staggering.