Re: [APML] Science in Astrophotos?

[Jerry Lodriguss <jml@astropix.com>]

Some quotes from different people:

 >pictures themselves are nice art. great to look at, but science comes from
 >the numbercrunching and analysis.

 >So there are few pictures in scientific astronomy.





I've been reading some of the messages on this thread with my jaw hanging 
open in disbelief.

This is supposed to be a list about astrophotography, and very few people 
seem to know anything about the history of science, let alone the history 
of astrophotography.

Photography (and astrophotography) has been one of the PRIMARY methods of 
scientific discovery because it allowed the recording of information beyond 
the range of human vision, things we literally could not see.

I will only mention a couple of things here, they might ring a bell:

The Palomar Sky Survey. I think some things were discovered on those 
photographs.

Voyager. Some details in the ring structure of Saturn maybe.

Pluto and many planetary moons were discovered photographically.

Asteroids.

Comets.

The Hubble Space Telescope takes some pictures I think.

To say that a CCD image is not a photograph is disingenuous. In fact, I 
would go so far as to say that any type of recording of any electromagnetic 
information is, in fact, a picture.

I would highly recommend the book "Beyond Vision" by Jon Darius.  It 
contains a concise history of scientific photography and one hundred 
scientific photographs and the stories that go with them and the importance 
and context of the discoveries they revealed.

It's $8 bucks used at amazon.  And that's hardcover!

Jerry






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