Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Illuminating the city’s night sky: Outsmarting light pollution to capture the cosmos”.
Evan KRAMER I like to think of astrophotography as a subset of general night photography. In night photography. Usually, you use long exposures on your camera to gather as many photons from a scene as you can possibly collect. In doing so, you can uncover what your eyes may not necessarily be able to see in the scene..
Astrophotography is basically using those techniques but pointing the camera at the sky to uncover the beauties of the cosmos.. Typically astrophotographers like to drive really far out into fields and get under dark skies. With a background of very little light pollution and do astrophotography there.
Urban astrophotography is really unique and I’ve really come to love doing it, maybe even more than regular, dark sky astrophotography. Since I came to MIT., While shooting at MIT does have its drawbacks in terms of the added light pollution, I absolutely love shooting here., It’s the added dynamic of shooting in a city environment with the beautiful campus in the foreground. That really makes the challenge of not only capturing beautiful night sky imagery, but also pairing it in a complimentary manner, with a city environment that is a true passion of mine.. When I was 12 years old, my parents took me on a vacation to Arizona and we visited Kitt Peak National Observatory just outside of Tucson., And I remember how miserably cold and windy it was that day. But we were getting a tour of the various telescopes by an astronomer. And the thought of staying up all night capturing images of things.
People had never seen before, really captivated me in a way. I had never been captivated before. From that point on. I read book after book on astronomy, astrophysics, then even astrophotography and pretty soon I got my first telescope, a deep blue 90-millimeter refractor my sophomore year of high school.
And I remember, staying out late at night, observing the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn craters on The Moon. And I would go into school the next day and tell my friends how excited I was that I was looking at these things and every response I would get would be dull and disinterested., And at that moment I realized that I needed a more effective Way to communicate my excitement with them., So that’s when I decided I needed to get a camera. Originally. I thought I wanted to be an astronomer, because I loved looking at things in the night sky, but quickly.
I realized that I mostly enjoyed making the instruments that enable one to observe the night sky. And that really came when I started doing astrophotography, because there are so many technical modifications you can do to the camera. That enables you to see more and see more detail of the night sky.. So, instead of being an astronomer, I realized that maybe aerospace engineering was the right thing for me: making the instruments building things that really enable one to see further and advance space exploration..
So here at MIT, I’m a graduate student in the Space Systems Lab working on a unique space. Telescope concept. This concept uses a rectangular strip mirror instead of a traditional circular mirror..
If you spin this rectangle about its optical axis and take a sequence of images. As you spin, you can use post-processing algorithms to reconstruct the same image. You would get with a traditional circular aperture and you can actually get higher resolution using this rectangular aperture system..
Now the challenge with these telescopes is that they have to spin at a very precisely controlled rate, as well as track the target that they’re imaging as they fly over in orbit.. So at MIT we’re building a hardware testbed to demonstrate that we can control the pointing of a rotating synthetic aperture system to the degree at which we need. So while I’ll, never trade.
My love for using telescopes on the ground to look at things in the sky. The opportunity to work on telescopes that go into space is something that I wouldn’t trade either.. I always have many ideas for new projects floating around in my head.
Being at a place like MIT, I feel like I’m not bounded in any way.. My creativity is always supported by facilities, managers and content creators who encourage me to continue to test the boundaries of what’s possible in urban astrophotography. [ MUSIC PLAYING ] .