Black and White Analog Dreams

[Nightfly]

For some time I have been wanting to produce a tribute to the great Edward Emerson Barnard with a set of B&W photographs captured in very much a similar manner as Barnard himself had completed over 100 years ago. Barnard was a pioneer in the field of astrophotography, indeed often attributed as the Father of Milky Way photography.

In June and July I set out to produce an initial effort to produce such a photograph. Although not the first B&W analog image I have taken on, this image is the first in a series just for this project.

This image, a mosaic of two frames, was taken on one of the shortest nights of the year and with sky conditions deteriorating as night turned to morning.

Featuring the Milky Way of Ophiuchus and Scorpius with many of the dark nebulae recorded and cataloged by the great Barnard himself, this image is markedly wider. This is due in part to being a mosaic, as the two images themselves have been taken with as Barnard did, with a portrait lens.

From the observatory notes:

My observatory notes from that night:

June 18, 2012 Shortest Night of the Year.

"Clear with threat of fog. Transparency average, becoming poor with sky becoming brighter by early morning. Transparency became very poor by end of run. I continued as stars were dimmed, but not condensed. All frames used the SMC Pentax 200mm f/4 @ f/5.6 and B+W 021 light-yellow filter."

Scorpius Frame: 10:30-11:30 SQM 21.14

Ophiuchus Frame: 11:35-12:35 SQM 21.22

Average SQM reading for my astrophotography site are on average, 21.5 mags/sq-arc-sec. So the night was much brighter than average.

Perhaps the filter helped with the low contrast sky, which was muddy in appearance. I stuck with it and I'm glad I did. I might not have if I was using color transparency film.

[farunj]

Wow!! That's awesome!!

[robbieince]

Amazing!

Regards

Rob

[SJJ]

Brilliant, well done.

[BigBlueOne]

Fantastic Jim, The good book says it took him 6 days to create it .He did,nt do to bad hey.

[Nightfly]

Thank you for the kind comments. I am working on a few other sets as well and hope to post sometime soon. I managed to dodge the fireflies on most efforts! A few did not pan out so well on their account. Roll with the punches as they say.

Thank you .

Jim

[mikeyscope]

Jim

Really Interesting work and a beautiful photograph......look forward to seeing more from your project, glad to know analog astrophotography is in safe hands!

Mike

[Nightfly]

Why thank you Mike. Glad to have you chime in. I so much looked forward to shooting this area with Fuji Acros. My earlier work with it determined that it was THE film for the summer star clouds. I got another image to post today that I must say, surpasses even this piece.

Always glad to hear from you Mike.

Jim

[Gina]

Another great one in spite of deteriorating conditions

[Tom OD]

Fantastic Jim,

So how do you mosaic film images? Are you scanning them into a PC,or is there a different technique?

Tom.

[Nightfly]

Fantastic Jim,

So how do you mosaic film images? Are you scanning them into a PC,or is there a different technique?

Tom.

All my films are digitized and mosaics are assembled with Autostitch. Once assembled, post processing begins. So to be fair, there is a digital workflow to my methods. Analog is simply the method of capture. No darkroom necessary!