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Capturing the Mystic of Natural Phenomena

By Christie Neptune

Abstract.

The 18th century was a pivotal moment within the global history of Astronomy. It was a period marked in the West by scientific enlightenment, discovery, and national competitiveness. Yet, despite the era's advancements, investigative research in astronomy rendered inaccurate singularities that encumbered progress. This essay will examine how the convergence of photography and astronomy in the 19th century led to new developments that advanced fundamental constants, aesthetics, and our understanding of the universe. To that end, I will show how a shift in methodological approach and philosophy engendered a new generation of scientists working across mathematical, cinematographic, and experimental mediums in modern and contemporary times. Finally, the gesture will show how the collision of art and science in the documentation of natural phenomena nuanced the field of photography and astronomy. Can scientific documentation of natural phenomena serve as art and conversely, can art and aesthetics influence scientific discovery?

Capturing the Mystic of Natural Phenomena.

The sun etches itself across light-sensitive paper producing a numinous image of solarization in Chris McCaw's photograph, Sunburned, GSP #166, Mohave/Winter Solstice, (2007, Sunburn Series). The positive gelatin print documents the winter solstice, a natural phenomena highlighting the earth's maximum tilt away from the sun during its orbit. The image is visually alluring and collapses the binaries of art and science. It visualizes the world as it is perceived and, in the same instance, alters such reality through aesthetics, a performativity that transcends. Can McCaw's print serve as a model of analogical reasoning imbued in empirical observation and speculative truth? Can Sunburned, GSP #166, Mohave/Winter Solstice serve as scientific documentation? Conversely, can scientific documentation serve as art?

The emergence of photography in 19th-century astronomy embodied the epistemological tenets of scientific realism. The era generated a series of visually compelling celestial images that illuminated unobserved truths of the universe. It is what Ian Hacking calls the two aims of science: Theory and experiment. "Theories try to say how the world is. Experiment and subsequent technology change the world" (Hacking 31). A shift in methodological approach and philosophy engendered a new generation of scientists working across mathematical, cinematographic, and experimental mediums. Although an interdisciplinary approach in 19th-century astronomy led to alternative observational instruments that advanced the universe's fundamental constants, do the astronomical photographs of research produced during this era meet the criteria for art?

In Capturing The Mystic of Natural Phenomena, I will examine the collision of art and science in Chris McCaw's Sunburned, GSP #166, Mohave/Winter Solstice (2007, Sunburn Series). I will further explore how the singularities of 18th-century Astronomy influence new developments in photography and aesthetics. Finally, the gesture will show how the collision of art and technology in the natural sciences was critical to new knowledge formations that proffered a greater understanding of the world around us.

In an address to the Royal Society in 1716, English Astronomer Edmond Halley formulated a method for measuring the Solar Parallax, the earth's distance from the sun, using the Transit of Venus. His predictions would rally a global quest to capture the Transits of 1761 and 1769 and engender national pride within Britain and British colonies. In British Preparations for Observing the Transit of Venus of 1761, Harry Woolf writes, "Once this was accomplished, other distances in the solar system then known only relative to one another could be computed, and the Newtonian system of the world could be brought closer to completion by the determination of its exact scalar dimensions,"(Woolf 400). The 18th century’s call to define astronomical units of the universe would change the branch of astronomy and conventional methods of scientific observation in the century ahead.

In 1761, John Winthrop, Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural philosophy at Harvard College, led an expedition to northeastern Newfoundland to observe the Transit of Venus. Although promising, Winthrop's venture was unsuccessful. It highlighted a global collective of singularities within 18th-century Astronomy. Utilizing the apparatus and other necessaries: an astronomical regulator, hadley's octant with nonis divisions, a refracting telescope with crosshairs, and a reflecting telescope adjusted with cross levels, Winthrop and his two assistants observed the Transit of Venus around the sun. One assistant counted the clock, and the other wrote down observations as Winthrop described it. The process was unexacting. In a written account addressed to the Royal Society, Winthrop reflected on his observations:

"There were but two of their eclipse that could have been visible there while I was on island; and though I watched for both of them, I was disappointed of both by unfavorable weather. Neither was I fortunate enough to get so much as one occultation of a fixed star by the moon though I spared no pains for it. The only observation I could get for this purpose was of the right ascension of the moon, which I endeavoured to find, by comparing with that of a fixed star. But whether any mistake was committed in counting the clock, or in writing down the observations or whether the position of the telescope was disturbed by any accident in the interval between the moon's and stars paffing, I am not able to say. However, as I am sensible that observation is not to be depended on,"(282-283 Winthrop).

Winthrop's observations of the 1761 Transit were part of a collective of disparities obscured by external interference and unreliable instruments. Traditional methodologies of observing the venus transit around the sun employed a persistence of observation and calculations over several hours. The most unstable tool within Winthrop’s scientific observation was the naked eye. Each observer posited a singularity that illuminated the subjective nature of perception. The 18th-century transits highlighted the need for alternative instruments that rendered invariable truths. Could an interdisciplinary approach to astronomy resolve such singularities? The 19th century's approach to astronomy fostered the development of alternative instruments that advanced scientific documentation of natural phenomena. A shift in methodological approach and philosophy engendered a new generation of interdisciplinary astronomers working across “physics, photography, cinematography, pedagogy, and mimetic experimentation” (Canales 587). The emergence of photography in astronomical observations allowed scientists to produce embodied representations of scientific theory. The exactness of form posited through photographic documentation superseded the human eye.

French astronomer Herve Faye advocated for the application of photography in scientific research. He called for the "suppression of the observer," a necessity in astronomical observations. Faye believed "the observer does not intervene with his nervous agitations, anxieties, worries, his impatience, and the illusions of his senses and nervous system." Through photography, "it is nature itself that appears under your eyes"(Canales 597). Could the emergence of new technology and the integration of photography in the field of astronomy answer the call brought forth by Halley at the beginning of the 18th century?

Although a photographic turn in 19th-century astronomy resolved a number of the issues encountered in the previous century, it faced much criticism. Photography's technical limitations in standardization led many scientists to question its efficiency in research. To eliminate observational singularities, astronomers would have to develop new standardization processes to strengthen the precision of documentation. Thus, astronomers in essence would have to become astronomical photographers. For instance:

"During the 1890s, Professional astronomers began to make significant contributions to both the development of photographic instrumentation and the chemistry of photographic materials. They also perfected methods for modifying existing telescopes. Astronomers pioneered in the use of dyes and filters to increase the sensitivity and spectral range of photographic emulsions, and they sought to apply photography to the solution of a number of important problems in astronomical research. " (Lankford 656).

In light of new developments, photography became widely accepted as a reliable instrument of scientific inquiry within the field of astronomy. Canadian-American Astronomer Simon Newcomb's photographic method for measuring the aberration of light contributed towards global efforts in defining the first system of astronomical units. The photographic process employed in Newcomb's observations was unique. "A heliostat tracked the sun and reflected its light through a fixed telescope, where the image was focused onto a photographic glass plate. Another glass, ruled with a grid of lines and a thin vertical wire attached to a plumb bob, immediately in front of the focal place, created lines on the Sun's image" as pictured in the 1882 photographic plate documenting Venus at the midpoint of its transit around the sun (Carter and Carter 47). Utilizing the photograph's scale, he converted linear to angular measurements of the solar parallax. Newcomb used an instrument developed by Joseph Winlock of Harvard College Observatory to calculate his conversions. Newcomb's calculations of the Solar Parallax from a constant of aberration "was adopted internationally at a Paris conference in 1896" (Dick 107). Newcomb's research contributed to ongoing efforts by astronomers to accurately measure the earth's distance from the sun [1]. It proffered observable data that confirmed much of the theories brought to fore by Halley in 1716.

The convergence of photography in 19th-century astronomy highlights the shift in scientific research from a realism of theory towards the realism of entities. Hacking defines this as "a drift away from representing and towards intervening" (Hacking 29). If photographic intervention in astronomy does not contort scientific data but posits a continuity of knowledge, does the aesthetic choices employed within McCaw's photograph fit within the schema of scientific observation?

McCaw's Sunburned, GSP #166, Mohave/Winter Solstice traces the sun's arc in the sky across four sequential exposures on expired light-sensitive paper during the Winter Solstice. The process is laborious and occurs over several hours of observation. The Artist constructs four large format cameras that he positions outdoors in the Mojave desert. In exposures ranging from 15 minutes to 24 hours, MacCaw produces photographic materiality documenting natural phenomena. "As the sun moves in the sky, it literally burns a hole in the fiber of the paper, leaving a physical scar of where the sun has been across the desert sky or abstracted mountain range, and making tangible trajectory of the earth's orbit around the sun in scored markings," (Dea K., Widewalls). In addition, the intensity of the sun's rays produces a positive print that reverses the tonal values embedded within the paper. McCaw's photograph does not distort the science of the solstice. Instead, it serves as a photographic intervention, one that models the sun's angle in the sky during the shortest day of the year. Perhaps elements of aesthetics employed within photography can inform scientific content. Contemporary scientific photographer Felice Frankel addresses this matter in The Art of Scientific Photography:

"By addressing the aesthetic component, you actually add data," contends scientific photographer Felice Frankel. '[The images] also allow you to get the concept without needing to know the language.' The resulting photographs become a legitimate part of the scientific investigation rather than just decorative trophies, she adds. Such images play a significant role in the data collection process and later in communicating the findings" (Peterson, 395).

For example, the sun's scorched mark on light-sensitive paper communicates its intensity and positioning in space during the winter solstice. However, it does not proffer an exactness essential to scientific research, a quantitative numerical representation of the sun's intensity. Although McCaw's photograph does not encapsulate an astronomical unit, it serves as a model of analogical reasoning, generating knowledge in its relations to a more extensive system. In McCaw's Sunburned, GSP #166, Mohave/Winter Solstice, one understands the solstice without knowing the specificity of its functioning. Such is the Artist's intent, visual language communicated through aesthetic, material, and compositional choices. However, can the astronomical photographs of the 19th-century transit observations fit within this schema of art? Singularities evidenced in the 18th-century transits conveyed the limitations of insular thinking devoid of creative intervention. Although the photographic shift in astronomy advanced astronomical knowledge of the universe, can the images produced by astronomers of this time be considered art? Does it employ the fundamental elements of visual language?

Like language, the visual image postulates how one communicates and perceives reality. It is the embodied form of creative integration governed by the fundamental laws of organization:

"It can interpret the new understanding of the physical world and social events because dynamic interrelationships and interpenetrations which are significant of every advanced scientific understanding of today, are intrinsic idioms of contemporary vehicles of visual communication: photography, motion pictures, and television" (Kepes 13).

Thus, visual language mobilizes one to reimagine and take action. It is positioned at the junction of three guiding principles: plastic organization, visual representation, and dynamic iconography. Within the field of attention of Newcomb's Photographic plate, Venus, at the midpoint, is presented as a dark spot superimposed upon the sun, a white circular form ten times its size. A stable relationship of proximity, similarity, and tonal opposites is established within the spatial structure between Venus and the Sun. A black border produces a visible boundary separating the circular forms from their surroundings. The plate is a plastic image that mobilizes our responses beyond the sensory range. "From the perception of sensory patterns, one moves to corresponding structures in emotional and intellectual realms. The experience becomes complete. To reach balance in this wider dimension, the dynamic bases, the spacetime span of the plastic experience must be secured" (Kepes 15). Newcomb's plate is the visual representation of the 1882 transit of Venus, a spacetime event orbiting the sun, and dynamic iconography of the first system of astronomical units. If the plate conveys an aesthetic, a plastic organization of relationships, does Newcomb's photographic plate of Venus at the midpoint of its 1882 transit meet the visual criteria for art?

In 2019, Mia Fineman of The Metropolitan Museum of Art curated an exhibition of astronomical photographs and drawings surveying visual representations of the moon. The exhibit, entitled: Apollo's Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography featured film excerpts and over 300 images and objects conveying the marriage of art and science[2]. Photographs displayed within the exhibition provided "scientific views of the lunar surface, which allowed for a better understanding of the topography of the moon" (Fineman, The Met 2019). What is unique about the exhibition is that it provided the opportunity to explore the relationship between art and science. It examines how scientific documentation of natural phenomena and lunar surfaces influenced speculative fiction and aesthetics in art.

The exhibit features Two Views of the Moon, in Siderius Nuncius (1610), a published drawing of the moon's rugged surface by Galileo. The illustration is from "The Starry Messenger," a catalog of work surveying his recorded observations of the moon over the course of nineteen nights. Gallelio's scientific documentation of the lunar surface inspired the artistic development of speculative fictions that blurred the boundaries between fantasy and fact. Filippo Morghen's Plate 7 (...) , [3] an etched print created using the aquatint process, is a speculative fiction inspired by Gallelio's lunar drawings. The work reimagines life on the moon.

In the print, lunar inhabitants resemble depictions of Native Americans and are surrounded by flora and fauna associated with the Americas. Moon people are shown living in giant pumpkins and hunting oversized possums, the smaller versions of which are indigenous to the New World. The similarities between depictions of these two territories previously unknown to Europeans are no coincidence, and they emphasize the way artists use the moon to reflect the anxieties, preoccupations, and fantasies of the times" (Fineman, The Met 2019).

In Apollo's Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography visual representations of the moon through drawing and photography highlight the growing influence of art and aesthetics on science. Can this dichotomy work inversely? Can art and aesthetics influence scientific experimentation and discovery?

A century before Gallelio's lunar drawings there was Adoration of the Shepherds with Saint Catherine of Alexandria, (1599), an oil painting by Italian Artist, Cigoli. The painting depicts an infantile Christ surrounded by figures beneath the moon's reflective light. Upon closer examination, one can see the details of the moon's rugged surface. The painting blends the study of nature with renaissance aesthetics[4]. "Cigoli had merely happened to portray the moon in a manner that suggested the ashen light before he knew of the existence of the phenomenon, and precisely in the period just before Galileo began to regard it as evidence of the Copernican world system" (Reeves 50). The Adoration of the Shepherds with Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Illustrated the natural phenomena of secondary light long before it was investigated in scientific theory and observation. Thus, one can argue that Cigoli's painting, the embodiment of scientific realism, proffered the ability to describe the world as it perceived and alter such reality in the same instance, influenced the lunar theory of Galileo [5]. Cigoli's Adoration of the Shepherds with Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Galileo's Two Views of the Moon, in Siderius Nuncius, and Filippo Morghen’s Plate 7 (...), exist within an entanglement of representation and intervention. Each work serves as a model of analogical reasoning that posits the continuity of knowledge, both speculative and empirical. Both astronomical photography and photography capturing natural phenomena contain the essential elements of visual language. They are "devices of orientation; a means to measure and organize spatial events. The mastery of nature is intimately connected with the mastery of space; this is visual orientation" (Kepes 14). What links Newcomb's photographic plate of Venus in the midpoint of the 1882 Transit and McCaw's Sunburned, GSP #166, Mohave/Winter Solstice are their visual orientations. Both works convey the mastery of nature and space. Newcomb's plate freezes the orientation of Venus, a small circular form, as it moves around the inner contour of the sun. Through a succession of exposures, McCaw's print is scorched by the visual orientation of the sun in space as the Earth orbits on an angled axis. The works are visual representations of natural phenomena oscillating between scientific documentation and artistic expression. Both works proffer a greater understanding of the world around us through modeling.

"The generative power of models lies in the degree to which they afford opportunities to be equivocal about questions of identity, to elide or blur the extent to which you are positing an underlying continuity of force or matter (a homology of substrate), and the extent to which you are reasoning analogically. And every time you permit a trepidation between those very different fundamental claims ("as" and "is"), every time you allow for an oscillation between referents, important thinking happens—That's how ideas change" (Burnett and Solomon 49).

In science, astronomical photography does not work as a totalizing representation. Newcomb's plate and McCaw's print do not explain the solar parallax. However, they posit a visual model for scientists to "think with" in their understanding of the earth's relationship to the sun.

The muddying of boundaries evidenced in Newcomb's photographic plate and McCaw's gelatin print demonstrates the inseparable nature of Art and Science. The 19th century marked a significant shift in scientific methodology and observation. The emergence of photography in scientific documentation of natural phenomena catalyzed an era of scientific advancement, discovery, and aesthetics. Photography allowed scientists to document the unseen, cosmic events invisible to the naked eye. In addition, the medium provided precision and consistency, an element crucial to scientific research and measurement. An interdisciplinary approach to astronomy across physics, photography, cinematography, pedagogy, and mimetic experimentation produced alternative instruments that advanced fundamental constants of the universe. "By the end of the nineteenth century, there was not a single branch of astronomy in which photography had not proven itself to be far superior to visual observations [...] The great new science of astrophysics unqualifiedly owes its development, it not also its origin to photography" (Norman 590). Through the application of photography, Newcomb fulfilled Halley's 1716 prediction and produced the first astronomical unit. But, could the advancements of 19th-century astronomy have happened without the aid of Photography?

McCaw's gelatin silver print and Newcomb's photographic plate functions as scientific realism. The photographs demonstrate a shift from doctrine and scientific theory towards a new materialism of knowledge formations. Astronomical photography posits a new way "to think about the content of natural science" (Hacking 26). Traditional tools of visualization encumbered 18th-century observations on the Solar Parallax. The creative integration of Photography into research allowed scientists to define celestial bodies beyond the human scope of vision. Like all vehicles of visual communication, Photography is restricted to the plastic laws of organization in visual language. Hence, there is a great deal in common between the Newcombs photographic plate documenting the transit of Venus and McCaw's gelatine silver print documenting the Winter Solstice. Both images can be perceived as poignant works of art. Embedded within the framed image are the values of aesthetic and praxes of plasticity. Although much of science concerns itself with precision, measurement, and empirical data, it is the intervention of art (photography) in science that proffered the continuity of knowledge.

Notes:

Using previous research and new adjustments, German Astronomer, William Harkness produced the first astronomical unit of the Solar Parallax in 1894. However, it was Newcomb’s system of astronomical units that was “adopted internationally at a Paris Conference in 1896.” See Steven J. Dick, “The American Transit of Venus Expedition of 1874 and 1882″ in Transits of Venus: New Views of The Solar System and Galaxy, No. 196, 2004. International Astronomical Union.

The Moon Sits for it’s portrait. The New York Times. Vicki Goldberg. July 3, 2019.

Full title is Plate 7 from 'The collection of the most notable things seen by John Wilkins, erudite English bishop, on his famous trip from the Earth to the Moon... (Raccolta delle cose più notabili Vedute da Giovanni Wilkins erudito Vescove Inglese nel suo famoso viaggio dalla Terra alla Luna...): 'Pumpkins used as dwellings to secure against wild beasts' (Zucche che servono d'abitazioni per garantirsi dalle fiere), after 1783. Filipp Morghen (Italian, Florence 1730–after 1807 Naples). Etching and aquatint. Plate: 10 13/16 × 15 3/16 in. The MET.

“Cigoli’s work blends the study of nature with the work of the High Renaissance artists,” The Adoration of the Shepherds with Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1599. Cigoli (Ludovico Cardi). Oil painting on canvas. 121 3/8 x 76 1/4 in. The MET.

“There is certainly no mention of the phenomenon, much less of its origin, in his earliest astronomical writing, the somewhat lackluster Tratto della sfera of 1586-1587, though this treatise does not involve an extended discussion of the appearance of the crescent moon when that light was most readily visible.” (Reeves, Painting the Heavens, pg 24).

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