A glance at the sky on a clear night in Wyoming may reveal radiant stars, but there are many more that cannot be seen by the naked eye according to an Astronomer.
Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Henry “Chip” Kobulnicky gave a talk about the struggles faced by artists and astronomers alike Monday night in the Visual Arts building and how the techniques of astrophotography can help to capture pictures of the night sky. The talk took place in conjunction with the Astrophotography exhibition in the UW Art Museum.
“My parents got me a cheap Kmart telescope when I was 7 or 8,” said Kobulnicky. “I would stay out and look at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn until they told me to come in out of the cold.”
Now that he is a professor at the University of Wyoming, he is able to use the largest telescope owned by a single university. The Wyoming Infrared Observatory sits atop Mount Jelm at 9700 ft. above sea level and can be utilized every single day of the year.
Kobulnicky’s research deals with an extreme range of contrast or “dynamic range;” something everyday photographers have to deal with. The astronomer said there is often a foreground in pictures where details cannot be derived because the limits of the dynamic range.
A digital camera can pick up 65,000 different arrays or shades, but even that contrast is not quite enough for astronomical research, said Kobulnicky.
“The brightest stars are zeroeth magnitude,” he said. “A 6th magnitude star is the darkest that can be seen by the human eye.”
Dynamic range causes problems with human sight, said Kobulnicky. Cars’ bright lights, for example, can make it so your eyes are oblivious of all other fainter sources of light.
In some astronomy projects, Kobulnicky has had to blank out sources of light when taking astrophotographs in order to see the surrounding objects near the bright star. This was also caused by the dynamic range phenomena.
Kobulnicky said humans have problems grappling with extreme light contrasts.
“Photography is a an extremely hard medium and when you add moving objects like stars people or this planet into photography, it makes it extremely complex to get accurate photos and astrophotographers do it extremely well,” said Senior Graphic Design Major Clint Robinson, who attended the talk.
Robinson said as an artist he was able to take away an understanding of how the RGB (red, green and blue) color model is used in photography and a better understanding of how light is displayed. The colors in the RGB model is used to combine red, green and blue light to produce derivative colors, making it possible to have color on television, computers and digital photography.
The exhibition in the Art Museum is ongoing through the summer with an array of programs similar to Kobulnicky’s talk taking in place in conjunction to the Astrophotography Show.
