| Is astrophotography a science, art or both? | |
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| Astrophotography is a science | |
| Astrophotography is an art | |
| Astrophotography is both a science and an art | |
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Well, the results of the poll are pretty clear with the overwhelming majority saying "both". As someone who has been doing this since the days of film and hand guiding, I agree. As for those who don't agree, that may be true for you for some specific "artsy" or "sciency" reason, but for most imagers is is indeed both. Also, although the image itself may or may not be science, the setup and configuration of the system and the acquisition of the data require a fair amount of technical knowledge of the science involved in optics, electronics, mechanics, and software. Finally, the percentage of art vs. science varies hugely with the target and the intent of the imager. Most of my images I consider to be a pursuit of technical excellence and an attempt to display to the best of my ability the astronomical content in each FOV. As such, it is neither scientific data or a purely artistic enterprise. It is an attempt to show what exists in the universe and in that sense it is more like a landscape photo, a documentation of what exists. Some liberties are taken but not out of any attempt to create art but rather to display reality despite the rather severe failings of the human perceptual system. |
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This question touches on other questions. For example, is astrophotography an extension of general nature photography or its own hobby? Or is astrophotography a separate hobby from astronomy? I've been a lifetime visual observer and I got into astrophotography seriously in 2013. For me, astrophotography is an extension of general nature photography, but that's because of my preference and the equipment that I use. Is it a separate hobby from astronomy? In my opinion, absolutely yes. The reason for my answer is that one can have absolutely zero knowledge of photography and yet be an excellent visual observer. You can buy the best telescope and the best eyepieces and never snap a picture. Is astrophotography a science? Definitely! The methods employed are scientific. If your images record star colours, that tells you something about star temperatures and interstellar reddening. Without going into details, star colours can even give you a hint of the relative positions of stars in the Milky Way. By studying Andromeda Galaxy photos and comparing them to Milky Way photos, one can also estimate the size of the Milky Way and the Sun's position in it. If planetary images have starry backgrounds, R.A. and Declination can be determined. If done often enough, retrograde motions of the superior planets can be recorded which tells you about geometry in the solar system. Even some basic spectroscopy can be done with just camera lenses. Galileo had none of the photographic tools that we have today, but he was a keen observer. Take a close look at astro images and you will see the science there, both the science that produced them and what you can learn about the universe. Is astrophotography an art? Definitely! When one tries to make a photo look as good as possible for aesthetic reasons, that's art. Astrophotography is both science and art. |
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Die Launische Diva: I disagree. If I look at someone's passport photo it most likely will have the same composition, framing and exposure as mine. If Peter Lindbergh filled in for a day at CVS, he could take someone's passport photo and we would not be able to pick it out of a group of 9. The opposite is true for astrophotographers, and is displayed via numerous Astrobin accounts. Many people have what I would call a style or aesthetic. One person can have multiple images of different objects that have a similar color, hue, brightness, saturation etc. Additionally, I can look at one person's image of an object and have it evoke more significant feelings or even different feelings than someone else's photo of the same. Maybe it's framed differently. Perhaps they chose a different color palette. Maybe they used a refractor and added diffraction spikes. There are a multitude of possibilities. For some people and instances this may not be true. If you have a group of people who are producing photos of centered objects with the same image dimensions with the minimal processing possible then you're not going to get the variance that I would think is needed for artistic expression. If I post a Calibrated Light frame with nothing but a stretch then I would agree with you that it isn't art. It could be science if I were imaging for scientific purposes - discovery, measurement etc. I refuse to believe that Margaret Huggins wasn't conducting science or that someone pointing a telescope at the night sky and discovering an Oiii emission nebula isn't conducting science. As far as the trade of product photography, I consider that to be art that is commercialized. A successful product photographer is going to be able to grab people's attention and evoke emotion and desire from them. I don't expect to see the depth of emotion and someone's inner struggle in a Coca-Cola advert, but Andy Warhol's work is considered art by many people. If someone's unique photographs are created with a with passion and emotion or evoke those feelings from other's than IMO it's art. -CS |
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| It should be more of science than a art with minimal weight to art. Otherwise, it sets a wrong expectation with general crowd with a common question if the space really looks like XYZ Image. |
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Dhiraj Patil: Labeling is important. “Composite,” “Superimposed,” artists’ “rendition.” Etc. Does space really look like that? With the exception of planetary, space doesn’t really look like any of my images, at least not to us with our small human eyes. If your eyeball has a 6”-11” lens and your brain could livestack images then, yes, that would probably be what it looks like. This holds true even if you were able to travel much closer to nebulae. If you had a space ship with FTL capabilities and could fly closer, you still wouldn’t see the Orion Nebula like we do in photos. It would appear larger but just as diffuse. If you were to look through a telescope it would look like a fuzzy cloud. If it’s a large enough light bucket and dark enough sky you will see color, but not to the degree of the photo. However, the picture does represent the light that is actually coming from the nebula. It’s really there and is in that wavelength (if RGB). The difference is that we need large mirrors or glass to collect and focus the light as well as a camera sensors’ pixel Well/film, to collect a bunch of that light / data over time. |
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Dhiraj Patil: I couldn't agree more. I tried deep sky imaging, but to me personally, photography is about capturing my experience. I found that working with a fixed mount gave me results that were pretty close to what is visible in a 4 to 6 inch telescope. For example, one of my Cassiopeia images taken with a 50 mm lens shows stars down to magnitude 12. My 150 mm version also shows stars that faint, but with 9 times the resolution. Now my emphasis is on photo realism, that is capturing objects as they are visible to me. Fixed mounted astrophotography works just fine for that. The images that I mentioned...  Cassiopeia  Gamma Cassiopeiae The colours are much more saturated than I would see at the telescope, but that is the artistic part. But it also is the scientific part as star colours give you an idea about their temperatures. |
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'Astrophotography', is such a broad term, and therefore it is what you make it. If you take an image of the Sun every day for 50 years and count the sun spots in the hope of uncovering or proving a pattern, it's undoubtedly science. If on the other hand, you take images like me, with the soul intention of creating beautiful pictures that help me connect with the cosmos. Then I believe it's art, no matter how scientific my approach. I think it's probably only people with control of such machines as Hubble, JWST or Euclid that have the privilege of doing both. They could meet their scientific objectives without producing final images that are pleasing to the eye or fire the imagination of the general public in the way they do. |
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If one of us constructed an MRI imager at home, and imaged with it real tissues and bones within the body, all without adding anything that's not there, beyond possibly a static remover (not blur-xterminator but noise-xterminator)... just because those videos and images aren't in that case used for a medical or scientific "purpose," but rather to behold in amazement the inner details of an organism, is that not then "science"? Perhaps the word "science" is the problem here, and particularly expectations of what the *purpose* is. Is it only scientific if we are doing some boring (but important) thing like measuring the distance between all the stars like GAIA does? Is that all science is? In my view, if one is not ADDING details that aren't actually there, and if they need very precise and expensive tools to SEE and OBSERVE what otherwise could not be seen, via repeated processes and measurements... that sounds to me like SCIENCE is in any case the core part of their endeavor, the *actual* thing they are doing (leaving aside the final post-processing). Every astrophotograhy project begins with careful observations of the night sky, virtually always with the objective of revealing something that can't otherwise be seen with the eye. That part is science, or at least scientific in nature, whatever they do with the data afterwards. And for certain, that is a lot of detailed data, most of which sadly never gets revealed in the comically reduced final static image we get to show our friends. I've wanted to make a script that could put together something much better than PixInsight's video of their Blink tool, but that's the point, the data we collect truly is videos worth of information. And every raw image is itself a wealth of information. Is that just art because we want to pull out different details? But that data is real! One stretch reveals intricacies of the swirls in the inner core of some galaxy, while a different stretch blows that whole core out but yet reveals better details elsewhere (yes I'm aware of Hyperbolic stretch) Compare in monochrome the green and blue filtered images of the horsehead or of many other nebulas, compared to the red. In green the nebula is almost invisible! This data is sadly lost on friends we quickly show our final image too. But it's not lost on us who saw all of that collected data. TLDR: Is science is to go where no man has gone before? Then we fail, as man has already gone where we go. But in that case, was Galileo not at all doing science when he constructed his telescope because it's now been superseded? So leave off "where no man has gone before," we are nonetheless trying to see *what most people never see*, with OUR VERY OWN tools and equipment, allowing us to observe realities that are otherwise hidden. |
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Even the hubble/jwst etc images posted by nasa are often highly manipulated art. can you do science? Absolutely! Most images however, are art. |
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Is Astronomy a Science? or is it confined to astrophysics, cosmology, and visual astronomy. Is everything heavier than He a metal? Can H be a metal? What is emitting starlight/sunlight? Do H+ ions emit Ha (or any Balmer series) light? Is gravity really the dominant force in molecular clouds or do they have a viscosity? Can photons impart/transfer momentum on molecular clouds? Would this be a stable or unstable displacement (fingering, nodules, elephant trunks) ? Why are Ha emissions associated with star formation. Why do old spherical glaxies contain mainly older stars? How do we get gold, when iron is the lowest energy element? Wouldn't these be good scientific (and fundamentally so) questions to answer? Wouldn't these be good scientific (and much more fundamental) questions to answer? Can these be partly answered through imaging - if not for the first time, at least for ourselves? What if I hang an image on the wall, or display on a monitor - someone says "that is a nice image - I love the detail, colours and composition" and I tell them what is means, scientifically, to me. I like that there is value in both and that they complement each other. |
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May it please the court: We've heard from several scientists and several artists in this thread and still have no resolution. So now it's time for a lawyer to weigh in and put this issue to rest--beyond a reasonable doubt.  From Merriam-Webster: art Objectively, astrophotography fits the definition of "art" under definitions 1 and 3 at the very least. What does M-W say about science? science This one is less definitive. There's some wiggle room, however, in sense 1: "knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method." (emphasis added). This definition says especially, but it does not say only. So we're not required to strictly follow the scientific method to do science--forming a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and documenting the process and results. Still, each of us does this, perhaps unknowingly, each time we shoot an object. We form all kinds of hypotheses based on information and tools we have and observations we've made: It won't be cloudy; the object will be visible at 9:00pm; I can shoot it for 6 hours tonight; an exposure time of 300s is optimal--or at least adequate; I can learn more about this object by shooting Ha as well as RGB. Then we go out and try this stuff and find out what happened. After that, we come here and document it. Then we refine our ideas and plans for the next time we shoot the object or one like it. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: That s%^t's science. It may not be great science. It might not be valuable science. And academics may turn up their noses at it. But it's still science. So astrophotography is clearly, objectively, and definitively both art and science (note that whenever a lawyer uses the word "clearly," it means they're full of horse hockey  ). I rest my case.But seriously, my own view is that it really is a bit of both. I know I certainly rely on a great deal of amazing science to even be able to do this (but as others pointed out, driving a car doesn't make you an engineer). And though I'm not a scientist (although I did get a master's degree in math way back in the Pleistocene epoch), I think that in very small, perhaps insignificant ways, I'm doing scientific work. I don't have to be on the Billboard 100 to make music; I don't have to be on the tour to enjoy playing golf; I don't have to have my work in the Met to do real painting. Aside from people in this avocation discovering new PNs, asteroids, doing spectroscopy, and following planetesimals (none of which interests me yet), the thing I see us as doing is contributing to a very large, growing, crowd-sourced repository of scientific data (I think Salvatore said in his talk last week that Astrobin would soon hit 1 million images). Imagine the real science that actual scientists could do with a gigantic database of images like ours taken a thousand years ago or longer (and all points between then and now). So while what we're doing may have little scientific value today, perhaps in the future, it will have significant value. And it may have an impact in ways we cannot predict. Historians and sociologists are still studying and debating the impact that Halley's Comet, as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, may have had on the Norman Conquest. There's also value in reaching others with these images. Space telescopes cost a lot of money. Public support is essential. I see the impact my own images have in my community. It's very gratifying and it's my raison d'etre. I may not have produced the most scientifically accurate, highest resolution image of the Seagull Nebula you've ever seen, but most of the time, it's the first and only time the people in my community have ever even heard of the Seagull Nebula, much less seen a picture of it. I will point out that it's definitely a better picture of it than any scientist produced before about 1990, which is attributable not to me, but to the advancement of this field in general--fueled by the interest and activity of people like you. So that brings me to the artistic part. If I want to reach people in the community with these images, I need to apply artistic principles to what I'm doing. I'm already going to try to achieve technical excellence to the best of my ability. That's the baseline. But it takes more than that to capture someone else's interest. If the New York Philharmonic were to hold open auditions for a concert of Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto, at least 100 people would show up who could play all the notes accurately and precisely. But the person who got the job would bring a lot more to the table than that. Framing is hugely important. It's not always possible to apply principles like the rule of thirds or the golden ratio to my framing, but I do so whenever I can. If I'm shooting Sadr, do I just want to stick the Butterfly in dead center, or could I frame it so that the result expresses a more natural pattern? As Andy Campbell pointed out in his now (tragically) deleted video, storytelling is important: Can I frame my target such that it includes things that provide context or create a visual contrast? I try to when I can. Dreyer's Nebula might be an example of this. Shooting at 500mm with a full-frame sensor, one can get a lot of the Cone in that frame. Which part? Why? Just things to think about when framing. Can I convey a message? I think so. There are all sorts of circumstances in the cosmos we can use to convey all kinds of messages, e.g., about time, permanence, beauty, violence, tranquility, creation, destruction. All the great themes of art and literature are available to us if we open ourselves up to them. Do I want my image to look like a painting? Well, that depends entirely on the painting. But in general, painters can teach us a lot about color, contrast, and illumination, among other things. So when my artist wife says one of my images looks like a painting, I take it as a great compliment, and I ask her to critique it as such. Having said all this about science, and particularly, art, I will add that one thing I always strive for is authenticity. Overriding all other considerations, as I said above, technical accuracy is the baseline, and I still want to convey these objects as they are--their structure, chemistry, and composition. But outside of the linear, pre-stretch processes--for example acquisition, stacking, DBE, deconvolution, etc., which are all highly technical and mathematical--everything else is purely subjective (e.g., stretch, contrast, saturation, and the like). The beauty of all this is that we can each approach this in our own way. And we do. We produce results that are different in some way every time (even two of the most pure purists alive would be very hard pressed to produce two images that looked identical). That's one of the things that makes this interesting. If every image I took of an object looked the same as every other, I would feel little need or desire to do this. Then if I wanted a picture, I could, as John Dobson (in)famously said, just buy one from the Lick Observatory. |
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| Most Doctoral degrees, aka PhD's in the US are from the department of Art and Sciences. Science and the Arts are connected and inseparable. |
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That’s like saying “i’m doing science” by picking up a pen and drawing a happy face on a piece of paper. I have to have the “skill” to draw a happy face I have to have the “knowledge” that I can use a pen and paper. I don’t know beforehand that the pen has ink or that the ball still rotates freely. Therefore: since there are unknowns, I’m “doing science” I call hogwash. 99.999% are not doing “science”, and even more are manipulating the data in ways that make “science” untenable. |
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Sean Mc: While I agree that the majority of astrophotographers are probably not actively conducting science most of the time, many study variable stars and report on them, and a number of APs have discovered nebulae in the past few years. AP has also been responsible for discovering supernova, and asteroids, as well as assisting NASA with general data acquisition from planetary to DSOs. https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-watch/about-exoplanet-watch/overview/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/professional-amateur-astronomers-join-forces/#:~:text=These%20amateur%20astronomers%20devote%20hours,in%20images%20and%20are%20astrophotographers. https://science.nasa.gov/get-involved/citizen-science/amateur-astronomers-help-discover-cosmic-crash/ |
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Sean Mc: I agree. Amateurs have contributed GREATLY to science. Many of those amateurs are using much the same equipment that astrophotographers do. That doesn’t mean that the images they take would qualify as “astrophotography” any more than an MRI tech taking images would be considered “art”. You could do art with an MRI machine, but most people don’t. what I’m saying is that 99.999% make art with their telescopes. |
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Sean Mc: I just went by the accepted definition of the word science. That definition says nothing about skill. And while it does say something about knowledge, it requires, at least in the sense that I used, that such knowledge be about general truths or the operation of general laws. Still, I hear you. Your reductio ad absurdum illustrates a good point. But I would still contend that the repository of images we are contributing to here may have some scientific value--if not today, then perhaps some day. |
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I think you’re missing my point. When you take an image, the original raw file has potential scientific merit. Even a stacked image has scientific merit. Once we start manipulating the data with deconvolution, stretching colors, artificial noise reduction, and applying masks, it’s no longer useful for any meaningful science. |
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Sean Mc: https://www.astrobin.com/ppj17m/ <- I'd say my not so pretty pictures of before and after a supernova could still be used for scientific purposes. Was I "conducting science?" No. Is the data flawed, yes. Is it useful for any meaningful science, I'd say it can be. I think your main point would be that Astrophotographers are usually not following the Scientific Method and as AP leans more toward science it will be less artistic. Hubble imaging is scientific data collection; processing them into pretty pictures is art. |
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Sean Mc: I understand your point. And I think I repeatedly added all the necessary qualifications and provisos to account for it. It means I’ve got 40TB of data on my NAS that has potential, current scientific value. But I would also contend that even a stretched, oversaturated image of M1 from 1,000 years ago would have serious scientific value today. |
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I'm on the science side BUT I don't think that one side or the other, can or should, ever claim that the other is wrong due to their own logic / reasoning, etc. In my case, studying a target enhances my personal scientific knowledge based upon available information about that target; therefore AP *could* push you to enhance your scientific knowledge. (A side note; I was horrible in Art class in my long ago elementary school days !) |
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| I've always considered the actual photography more science, but the processing more art. Good art tends to begin with technically sound data. |
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I think whether it is science or art depends completely on how it is used. Kind of like asking, "Is a wrench a tool or a weapon?" Depends on whether you are turning a bolt, or swinging the wrench. In general, science is a process where we propose hypothesize about how the universe works, examine the implications of those theories ("If gravitational waves exist, then we should be able to see them in this way..."), and then test to see if the predictions are true or not. Certainly, astrophotography can be useful in testing scientific theories. Professional astronomers wouldn't build large telescopes and attach cameras to them if that weren't true, though cameras are hardly the only instruments at the backs of telescopes. So, astrophotography can be a useful scientific tool. It can also be a useful educational tool in science. Think of it as another method of visualization, like a pie chart or a line graph. Astrophotography is a key element in astronomy education since it can quickly summarize and characterize objects that might otherwise require hundreds of words of explanation. I think the "Hubble Heritage Project" falls in this category. Scientific data, being used to educate the wider public. Most of us on Astrobin, though, are using astrophotography as what I'll call "technical art". I think the technical part is pretty obvious--lots of computer skills required in order to get our telescopes to collect high quality data. Additional technical skills required to reduce those data (calibrate/register/normalize/integrate). More technical skills required to effectively process those data to produce a final image. I suppose the trend towards smart telescopes, live stacking, etc. may reduce or remove the technical aspects, but for the present they remain. Clearly, the end result is art. Astrophotography as practiced on Astrobin is intended to get an emotional or intellectual reaction from a viewer, just most other artistic photographs. Perhaps it inspires with beauty. Perhaps it awes with scale. Perhaps it generates interest in a given object or class of objects which inspires more reading and learning. Or maybe it just shows other astrophotographers what is possible in terms of image detail and depth with a given set of equipment, and given set of software tools, and a given set of skills. That is what art is supposed to do--create a reaction in the viewer, even if the viewer is generally another astrophotographer. |
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| I would go to the source, read what Francis Bacon had to say on art and science. |
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My two cents: Astrophotography is art, most of the time. However, it can be science, if it is utilized as a scientific tool. When astrophotography came up around 100 years ago, it created a huge impact on science. Star catalogues got much more accurate, and much fainter objects could be observed. It also opened the window into stellar spectrometry, the detection of the red shift, spectroscopic double stars, the period-luminosity relation, Hertzsprung Russel diagrams, ... huge! |
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I personally wouldn't either call amateur astrophotography art nor would I call it science. It is more a certain kind of documentary photography, throwing technicall skills onto objects in the sky. Art is a mix of magic, image composition and especially perspective. And shooting astronomical obejcts from the earth, we all have the same perspective. So besides some cropping (which could be composition) it is definitely not art. For science, as already mentioned, all our workflows are typically too much of try-and-error, tweaking parmaters towards something, that looks nice. Look at narrowband H-Alpha, for example. You find all shades of red between orange and purple, saturated or not so saturated. Just search for the Rosette nebula or the north america nebula on astrobin: if you exclude Hubble palettes and other false color imagery, you will find tons of different reddish hues. H-alpha, however, has a clearly defined emission wavelength and so does have OIII. In my images, I at least try to work those narrowband emitters in a scientific way, as I found a mathematical method, to exactly calculate, what the colors for OIII, Ha and other emitters are on an sRGB or AdobeRGB monitor. Its a similar thing with sharpening: Being scientifically correct, the only way of sharpening would be a deconvolution based on the PSF of stars in your image. Forget about BlurXT, unsharp mask and stuff like that. That's completely unscientific, as is for example Topaz Denoise AI. So, linear, unaltered and properly calibrated and stacked raw images have some scientifical value. But when we are starting processing those to taste, then typically every scientific approach has been eliminated. CS Markus |
