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Home > Featured Exhibitions > David Malin
David Malin worked for 26 years at the Anglo-Australian Observatory as photographic scientist and astronomer. There David Malin developed hypersensitising processes which can give enormous gains in speed to the photographic materials that were used in astronomy. He also invented new ways of revealing information on astronomical plates, a speciality which has given him an international reputation.
These novel image enhancement techniques quickly led to the discovery of two new types of galaxy. Malin-Carter 'shell' galaxies have low contrast but large-scale features associated with otherwise normal galaxies, while in 1987 he discovered an extremely faint, uniquely massive 'proto-galaxy' which has since been named Malin-1. These are some of the faintest objects ever detected by an ground-based telescope and are the result of a photographic process that has been dubbed 'Malinisation'. Their discovery represented a significant advance in photographic astronomy, as well as being a major contribution to research on galaxies.
The several photographic techniques developed for research work come together in a method for making true-colour astronomical photographs from black and white plates taken in three separate colours. They have been widely published on the covers of hundreds books and magazines, including LIFE and National Geographic and as a series of Australian postage stamps.They have also appeared in international solo art exhibitions in Australia, Britain, China, France, Italy, India and the USA. David Malin has also used CCDs for colour imagery on the AAT, but so far none of these images has made it into an art gallery.
David Malin has published over 120 scientific papers and a similar number of popular articles on astronomy and photography, as well as seven books. He is also a well-known and entertaining lecturer on these and related topics. A recent book The Invisible Universe (Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown and Company, 1999) is a large format celebration of the beauty of the night sky, a subject increasing explored in his gallery exhibitions. He was also scientific advisor for Heaven and Earth (Phaidon, 2002) a profusely illustrated work that uses scientific pictures to explore all scales from the atomic to the cosmic.
David Malin's contributions to photographic science and astronomy have received international recognition, including honorary degrees from two Australian Universities:
Elected Fellow of The Royal Photographic Society, 1983.
Henri Chretien Award of the American Astronomical Society, 1985.
Jackson-Gwilt Medal and Prize of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1985.
Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) from the University of Sydney, 1989.
Rodman Medal of the Royal Photographic Society, 1990.
Honorarary Fellow of the Australian Institute of Photography, 1993.
Progress Medal of the Photographic Society of America, 1993.
Commonwealth Medal of the Australian Photographic Society, 1993.
University of NSW Press/Eureka Science Book Prize), 1994.
Appointed Adjunct Professor of Scientific Photography at RMIT, 1996.
Elected Fellow of the International Academy of Astronautics, 1998.
Awarded Lennart Nilsson Prize, 2000
Doctor of Science from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 2003.
David Malin's name is associated with "Malinization", a process for revealing very faint features of photographic images. It was used to discover Malin-1, one of the most massive (and least conspicuous) galaxies known and Malin-Carter shell galaxies, distinctive elliptical galaxies that have low contrast, arc-like structures. Malin spikes and bullets in the extreme star eta Carinae. The minor planet (4766) Malin. (1987 FF1 was discovered on Malin's birthday, March 28, by Eleanor Helin at Palomar).
Why These Photographs?
Most of the David Malin images presented here are of distant objects too faint to be seen by eye, even with a large telescope. The rich colors and unusual forms have been captured photographically, using sophisticated techniques and the finest wide-field optical telescopes.
In these pictures we link the familiar Earth, spinning endlessly beneath the stars, to the stars themselves and to distant galaxies of stars far beyond. This link between our planet and the stars is romantic, spiritual, provocative and uplifting; it is also real. The Earth beneath our feet, the oceans that divide the land and the very air we breathe are made of elements that were created inside the stars. These elements were not present when the Universe began; life would not have been possible without many previous generations of stars, ancestors of the sun.
We are made of star stuff, created inside stars that have long since vanished in spectacular explosions. Within galaxies, the hydrogen and helium of early Universe is gradually enriched with heavy elements from the disintegrating stars. It is from that mix that the sun and its collection of planets formed. The same 'stuff' colors these pictures and it is from star-stuff that we ourselves are made. As we explore these photographs we see echoes of our origins and premonitions of our destiny. That is the theme that links these images by David Malin.
Though the science of astronomy is implicit in every image, we have selected this series of David Malin's photographs for their visual impact, not their scientific content. However, the science is still there, and the images tell the story of the discovery and exploration of our galaxy, the Milky Way and the birth and death of the stars that sustain it. Though we hope we have selected beautiful photographs, we would like to emphasize that these are, fundamentally, scientific images that record the natural world in the colors of nature; here we see it as it is, not as it might be imagined.
The Techniques
Most of the color photographs in this catalogue are made with the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) or the UK Schmidt Telescopes, located on Siding Spring Mountain in New South Wales, Australia. When the AAT is used as a camera it has a focal length of 12.7 meters and a focal ratio of f/3.3, a very impressive reflecting 'lens'. The field of view covers 1 degree of sky (about twice the diameter of the full moon) and the images are recorded on special black and white photographic emulsions coated on glass plates 255 mm (10 inches) square. The UK Schmidt is primarily a photographic survey telescope and has a focal length of 3.07m with a focal ratio of F/2.5. It photographs a 6.6 x 6.6 degree field on glass plates 356 mm (14 inches) square.
The color photographs are made by photographing each scene three times, with combinations of plates and filters designed to record blue, green or red light, chosen so that all the colors in visible light are recorded. Before exposure, the plates are specially pre-treated (hypersensitized) to increase their sensitivity to the feeble light from distant stars and galaxies. This treatment usually consists of baking or soaking the plates in nitrogen gas for several hours in a moderate oven, followed by a room temperature soak in pure hydrogen. This has the effect of increasing the long-exposure speed by a large amount. Even so, exposures of 30-40 minutes are required in each of the three colors for some of the faintest objects.
The color pictures have been made by photographically combining the three separate, black and white images using techniques developed by David Malin in the photographic laboratories at the Anglo-Australian Observatory. Black and white positive film copies are made from each of the plates, each image containing either the red, green or blue information from the object being photographed. The positives are projected by an enlarger, one at a time, through red, green or blue filters and in perfect register, on to a sheet of color negative film. From this master negative, derivatives of any size can be made. This elaborate process is necessary because conventional color films do not have sufficient speed, contrast or spectral sensitivity for recording faint objects in their correct colors. However, it produces colors that are true-to-life.
Before being combined into a color picture, the black and white images on the glass negatives can be enhanced by special copying techniques to reveal extremely faint objects, while the enormous brightness range found in star forming regions can be adjusted by unsharp masks to make their internal structure visible. The effect of these procedures on the final color print is to give the impression that the color sensitivity of the eye has been greatly increased and that the objects are being seen in their natural colors. These techniques are fully explained in "The Colors of the Stars", a popular-level book by David Malin and Paul Murdin (Cambridge University Press, 1984), and in a series of articles in Eastman Kodak's Tech Bits magazine, Issues 1 and 3 of 1990. David Malin's book "A View of the Universe" (Cambridge University Press, 1993) describes and illustrates many more of these unique astronomical photographs.
Using a large telescope is much more than a one-person task. At the Anglo- Australian Telescope the telescope itself is always driven by a night assistant, and the act of 'observing' is physically demanding and often shared with colleagues, especially during long winter nights. At the UK Schmidt, a dedicated observing team take plates of superb quality on request, however, in both cases, it is in the darkroom that the images seen here are created from these raw materials, which are only possible with superbly crafted telescopes and skilled support staff.
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