first light

the first light of 2018, Loch Moidart at Dorlin

lunar

coffee grounds

Back from Sydney, Jim and I showed the collaborative work we made in Australia at Vault Art the other weekend. For that we exhibited 12 of the 28 images we made in our series "coffee grounds". They were created by photographing the remains of our coffee left in the bottom of our cup each morning and made negative, although other than that, there is very little manipulation.

Here is a selection from the series.

the real death star

Mimas, photographed by the probe Cassini

Mimas, one of Saturn's moons is the smallest object in the solar system to be round due to the pull of it's own gravitational force. It's impact crater Herschel (named after the moon's discoverer) is 81 miles across, it's walls approx 3.1 miles high, and it's central peak rises 3.7 miles from the crater floor (Mt. Everest is 4.1 miles high). The impact on this moon must have been immense as there are fractures on the far side that may have been created from shock waves from the impact traveling through the body of the moon. Often thought to be the inspiration for Star Wars' death star, the crater was in fact discovered after the creation of the film.

Herschel crater

the Death Star from Star Wars

gemenids 2010

Tonight is the annual peak of the Gemenid meteor shower, a real rival to August's Perseid shower and predicted to be the best display of "shooting stars" this year. A crescent moon will dull the intensity only until it sets after midnight, so it's best to view them after then. Look towards the constellation Gemini (hence the name Gemenids) to see these relatively slowly moving meteors. The radiant - the point from which the meteors appear to originate, is close to the bright star Castor in Gemini. Here in Scotland, the sky's currently clear so it could be an amazing night to view them.

This time last year, I posted from a freezing (-7 degree) wild camping trip, having climbed Gulvain, and remember watching this great shower in a remote spot in the Highlands away from the light pollution of the city.

cold camping last year...

There's also a lunar eclipse due just before dawn on the 21st December, though the conditions in the UK aren't optimal for viewing it as, at mid-eclipse at 8.16am, the moon will have virtually set and the sky brightening as the sun rises. The moon begins to enter the shadow of the earth at 5.29am when the moon is just under 30 degrees above the horizon. Slowly, the left hand side of the moon will darken until at 7.41am it will be within the umbral shadow.

Samuel Palmer

Samuel Palmer - Shepherds under a full moon

An odd piece here, by an artist who clearly influenced the likes of Piper and Nash. Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) is someone whom, again, I have probably overlooked over the years. This work, like the piece in the previous post on Nash, is a rather bizarre, and to me, work that quite ahead of it's time.

Nasmyth's models

...some more of James Nasmyth's photographs made using the plaster models he created to represent the lunar surface.

Partial eclipse of the moon

Partial eclipse of the moon. Observed October 24, 1874. (1881-1882), again by Trouvelot.

partial eclipse of a blue moon

(Image from flickr - moonmeister)

The curved shadow of Earth cast across the full moon. Being the 13th full moon of the year, it was a blue moon. An eclipsed blue moon is a one in a hundred year occurrence. Image taken on 31 December 2009

New Year's Eve

The full (and also blue) moon on the last day of 2009 meant that the Applecross hills and the Bealach na Ba were clearly visible all night and moonlit walks were a distinct (if cold) possibility. This image was made at 11.00pm on New Year's Eve.

James Nasmyth & August Strindberg

James Nasmyth, the Scottish inventor and engineer, was obsessed with all things lunar. He built his own telescope to view the moon, and, in order to illustrate the book The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (1885), he created these amazing images. Unfortunately, photography couldn't itself actually record it's surface when he made these images, so Nasmyth instead created wonderful plaster models based upon his observations through his telescope and photographed them in the moon's place. A crater on the moon is named after him.

 

Meanwhile in 1893, August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright, during a bout of writers block and existential crisis, turned to photography. Attempting to photographically capture the night sky in works he called celesteographs, instead of placing his film in a camera, he simply left the film to be exposed to the night on windowsills, on the ground, and sometimes bathed in developer (Strindberg apparently distrusted the distortion of lenses, and whilst he had made a few rudimentary pinhole cameras, by now had decided to abandon the camera altogether). Although believing the results to be images of stars and constellations, in reality, he had recorded the marks of dust and chemical stains accrued during exposure and the inexact development of late 19th century photographic technique. Nonetheless, the resultant images retain a connection to the original idea, to the 'witnessing' of an event, a measure of time depicted in alchemical transformation.

 

I think I like this divergence from the scientific that both these non-artist makers employed. There's something in the way that the forms of both abandoned the limitations that science and technology afforded them at the time (whether deliberate or not), and moved towards a notional description of place that is perhaps 'truer' than the one that could, in reality, have been achieved through more 'correct' means.