 Hi everyone, this is Nico from the Advanced Imaging Conference in San Jose, and I got to sit down here with Adam Block, an astrophotographer, for a little bit here. And why don't you just introduce yourself, Adam? So I'm Adam Block, I'm an astrophotographer. I'm also an instructor in astrophotography. I create instructional videos that show people how to put together the data. And I work at the University of Arizona in the Department of Astronomy doing some research there. So that's basically what I did. Adam gave a presentation called Beauty and the Beholder for the Astro Imaging Channel, which is a weekly talk show on YouTube, all about astrophotography. And that presentation really stuck with me. You recommended a number of books, you showed a number of your astrophotographs. And one thing that I wanted to ask you about it was this concept of pre-visualization. And specifically, where in the process for you pre-visualization arises? There are some kinds of objects that you would take pictures of where they're well-known objects. So you might visualize that, boy, I would really like to take a picture of that. It could be a spiral galaxy or some well-known nebula. And you already have in your mind's eye what the ideal version of that is hanging up on your wall or something that you could in some way maybe share with other people. But I think the other form comes a little later where it might be an object that there might not be very many good pictures of or something that you haven't worked on before where you don't really have an idea until you look at the data and you actually examine it once it's in your hands because there is more information contained in the data that you can display on the screen at any one time. So just by manipulating the screen stretch and starting that process of looking at what you've captured that informs this pre-visualization of the kind of contrast you might want in the final image, the kind of details, the things you need to mitigate, like the noise, stuff like that. And this I feel is what Ansel Adams would do, the father of pre-visualization, when he would stare through his camera at some scene. He was already thinking about what he was going to dodge and burn in his laboratory just by being out there in the field and looking at the raw data, if you will. So speaking of Ansel Adams, do you find inspiration in art outside of astrophotography that then is directly related to maybe choices you make when you're processing astrophotographs? I think the answer is yes, but it's in a surprisingly different way. One of the things that I do as a communicator and a public outreach kind of person, popularizer of astronomy is that I'm always thinking of a way to present an image that offers a perspective. And art does that, right? Art does that by deconstructing things or displaying things or expressing things in a different way that makes the viewer approach the view or think about things in a different way than you might otherwise do. And I do the same thing in terms of astrophotography. So for example, there was a slide that was shown at the end of the presentation that we saw here today by Dr. Plate, which was a picture I took of Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the sky. Now, who would ever stare at Betelgeuse for three hours and just get an RGB image of it just to see what's there, right? I thought that was a cool idea. I consider that idea just about as good as the final, the picture is, I mean, it's a nice picture, but I think the ideas really stands out in that picture. And I hope that a viewer would think, wow, no, I've never actually seen one of the things that are near Betelgeuse because it's so bright. Astrophotographers avoid bright stars. They don't go take pictures of them. So that would be an example. We're sort of being straddling professional astronomy and amateur astrophotography. Is there anything in the professional realm you think is going to trickle down? There are always things that seem to trickle down. There's some technical stuff in the days that I recall, for example, deconvolution, right? That's the obvious example where the Hubble Space Telescope was producing fuzzy images or you had the atmosphere producing fuzzy images from above looking down. There has been this concerted effort to try to do signal processing to make them clearer. Well, that trickles down to software that we all love and use to sharpen our images, right? But I think that there's other things. Professional astronomers have the same challenge when it comes to showing the public what they're doing. And there are many clever people to come up with interesting ways of doing that. And with my little radar, I'm always on the lookout for how other people choose to express that information or make it publicly available. So yeah, I look for that as well. One thing you showed in your talk last night was that the air glow in the red spectrum is really, really bright. It's really bright. But we don't sense that. So yeah, but so is that I mean, I know there's other limitations to shooting infrared from Earth. But is that one of the major ones? That is a big one. There are certain bands that if you look in that the air glow is just so bright, you got to block it. And then there's other windows where the atmosphere literally absorbs the light at that wavelength. And so there are small little windows where certain wavelengths come through and others don't with water vapor and things like that. So yeah, it gets kind of weird when you start looking at these other wavelengths, how the atmosphere affects what we see. It just happens to be, well, it's not by chance, but it is transparent of the wavelengths that we enjoy with our eyesight. On the topic of wavelengths, is there, when you're reading like academic papers on objects, are there any wavelengths that a professional astronomer would capture that gives you a hint about something that may be visible in the visible spectrum? I think that the funny thing is that when you look at a lot of the papers, they tend not to have very good pictures. So it isn't so much the science that they're doing may or may not inform how interesting the object might be to photograph. But sometimes you can find hints at things because there are papers, for example, where one of the areas of interest is to find stellar streams around other galaxies. And if you look at some old papers, there are hints in some of these old papers because people study galaxies, they take survey images of galaxies all the time. The star streams were there, but they were just so noisy. I mean, no one would ever think that that was a feature that was something to go after. It just didn't have the sensitivity. And it wasn't something they were looking at, right? They looked at the same galaxies. But later, the study became something that was more significant and important. So you take these deep exposures that can even be done with modest equipment and now you're detecting stellar streams around other galaxies, which speaks to something about cosmological evolution of the universe. That's cool. That's a great Pro-Am kind of connective tissue. When you're thinking of the story of an image, are you thinking in terms of just the image or are you also thinking in terms of, and I could verbally explain this based on the image? Do you get what I'm getting at? I do. I think for me, the story is often a perspective is what I'm trying to show. So it isn't necessarily something that would necessarily need to be put into words. Sometimes it helps, but a lot of what an image communicates can be part of the physics of what's going on. So as an example, when you show edge-on spiral galaxies, right? If you process the edge-on spiral galaxy, you can make the dust lanes show up very well, but there might be more to it than that in the sense that if you apply too much contrast, those dust lanes become very opaque and difficult to you don't sense that there's light coming through where there is an attenuation of light of all the stars that are in the galaxy, that light shines through, right? So part of the story I wanna tell is that feature as well. That informs the steps that I'm going to do when I do my image processing is that there may be a perspective here that I wanna express, that I wanna be sure that the data shows me or displays in some way. And that's the story, even without words, I think that that's part of the story, that there's a certain naturalness, I think, in that. And that's kind of a style that I've generally done with my images through time. And it's that kind of thought process I can kinda use. I'm gonna mention a very unnatural photo you showed in your presentation where you put the full moon with Andromeda galaxy taken on the same night. Very true. Are you worried at all that if that photo circulates on the internet without the context that people will get the wrong impression? Of course. However, I was not the first to make that photo. The first of its type that became popular was done by an astronomer at NOAO. And its intent, as was mine, was always to show a perspective. And so the genesis of that particular kind of picture was really another one of these perspectives is one of scale. It was this understanding of these objects in the sky they're so far removed from an understanding of how big they are, how bright they are, how faint they are, all of that kind of stuff. So to put the moon a half a degree thing next to the Andromeda galaxy, basically three and a half to four degree thing really offers some mind shaking moment of a perspective even though they don't naturally appear in the sky together because the moon is so bright because they don't come near to one another, all of that kind of stuff. It is a perspective that was worthy of the misinterpretation. In this particular example. Sure. Probably because of its intent. Sort of related, what is your opinion on narrowband imaging in general? I know that you do mostly true color imaging. And I'd like to explain why. One of the reasons why is because through time I was always administering these astrophotography programs as part of the public outreach that I did. And narrowband imaging takes an awful lot of time because you're looking at a small amount of light and you got to expose for long periods of time. So that was not amenable to any of the public outreach that I did because you couldn't invest that. No one would pay for that amount of time or spend that amount of time to somehow collect data just for those purposes. So broadband was an obvious fit for the kind of imaging that I was doing in those programs. Nowadays, there are other sources that I can tap into. Remote observing in Chile and other people's data that have been kind enough to give me their data. Things like that become other resources for me. And it's so recently I've started to actually work with some narrowband data. So I've never been opposed to it. But it is something that is, there's a different approach I think and it certainly has more freedom in the expression because the constraints are relaxed. There are no longer, you can put things in one channel or another channel, you can manipulate the contrast or the way in which you might deal with just true signal strengths, right? If you did that in broadband imaging, it'd be weird because you could just make green things, but everyone would look at that. But in narrowband imaging, we usually boost the O3 quite a bit because the HLF would just dominate others. But the story there then is really to highlight, perhaps the story, I mean, it could be other stories, but for me, the story might be, I wanna highlight the physics of where the gas is, right? So, and I think that that's generally the convention is that you're going to offer those intermediate colors or the striking colors where there is this differential in the emission of the gas. And so if the boosting of that signal is necessary to highlight those differences, to make that contrast, yeah, that's fair game, that makes sense to me. So I don't wanna hold you too long, but I want you to tell people on my YouTube about your educational efforts with your website and courses. Oh, so my site is called atomblockstudios.com and I really began the work and study and learning of CCD imaging when it kind of just started with amateur astronomy and this would be in the mid 1990s. So in the course of this experience of working with cameras and then working with the data, I've had the opportunity to experience a whole set of different software programs. And then subsequently because of this experience, create instructional content that helps people to learn how to use the software and learn how to manipulate images and learn just more about astronomy in general. So today my emphasis is on software programs like Vixensite that allows for the creation of these beautiful astronomical images. It's a huge, very sophisticated program that offers many, many degrees of freedom. And so it's ripe obviously for this instructional need to explain how to really take advantage of like any other program like Photoshop has that same kind of need, although it's well covered today. But that one is not dedicated to astronomical imaging where Vixensite is. So that's kind of the niche that I'm currently sitting in right now.