My aim was to combine science and aesthetics without compromising the technical information in the image.
Introduction
It was not until I visited Australia that I came to appreciate the magnificence of the night sky. Lying on a beach outside Darwin a little after midnight, half a world away from the city lights of my hometown in Scotland, I saw the Milky Way for the first time – a swathe of scintillating luminosity like hoar frost on black winter earth. A dazzling ethereal whiteness. For I saw no colour. This, I was later to learn, is not because the heavens are colourless, but because my human visual apparatus is so inefficient in low light – running on the retinal rods that register light and shade while remaining below the range of the colour sensitive cones.
It was only with the invention of the telescope that we began to understand the colours of the planets and the complexity of the night sky. A telescope gathers light focusing it into the pinhole of the pupil in order to perceive bigger, brighter images. When reflector telescopes were invented, the curved mirrors could gather and focus light across an even wider diameter. But it was photography that was to bring the greatest insights. For photography could gather light across time. Building an image of distant phenomena invisible to the eye, even with the aid of a telescope. Nonetheless, those images remained in monochrome. That is, until someone found a way to create colour images from black-and-white photographs. That someone was David Malin, and it earned him the unofficial title of The Man Who Coloured the Stars.
Throughout his long career, David Malin has worked with photography at the intersection of physics, chemistry, and aesthetics, creating images rich with scientific data while also enriching to the eye and to the imagination. His photographs have changed the way we think of the universe. In this interview he looks back over a remarkable career in which he has used photography to make visible the wonderful colours of the physical universe from the microscopic architecture of crystals to the unimaginable vastness of deep space. He has achieved this by drawing on and integrating different strands of knowledge, ways of thinking. It is a process as creative as it is analytical, and it has taken him on a visual journey from outback New South Wales to the very edge of the known universe.
Alasdair Foster
First recognised in 1976, cometary globules are isolated, faint, relatively small clouds of gas and dust within the Milky Way.
Interview
What first led you to become interested in photography?
I had a French girlfriend when I was sixteen or so – she was an au pair, living in England. She invited me to spend some time with her family in southern Paris. This was 1957 and I had not been overseas before. Compared to Manchester, Paris was a culture shock. I was enchanted by the beauty of the city, which I photographed using a simple box camera, returning with several 120 rolls of black-and-white film.
Although you were later to become best known for your images of deep space, you began your career as a chemist looking inwards at the structure of crystals. How did that research begin?
In my teens, I worked in a laboratory owned by the Swiss company Geigy. There was a company darkroom anyone could use. A colleague showed me how to process the films and use an enlarger. I was instantly hooked. One lunchtime I was found working in the darkroom when I should have been doing something else. I got spoken to about it, but then they said: Look, if you are interested in this we can buy a microscope and you can photograph some of the crystals and fibres we are working with in the labs. Perhaps a British company would have fired me for taking time off. But they said: No, clearly this lad has got some talent, and they let me develop it. And it made my career.
[Left] © David Malin ‘Crotonic acid – an extremely powerful purgative’
[Right] © David Malin ‘2,2-Dipyridyl – used as a reagent for the determination of iron’
What was it you could learn from these images?
At that time, physical research was unusual in chemical company. Ciba-Geigy – as it was to become – manufactured pigments, dyestuffs, rust inhibitors… things that coat surfaces. That interface between the surface and the coating was inaccessible once the coating was applied. But many of these materials were crystalline. With a microscope you can dig in there and see what is going on at that interface. I developed techniques using electron and polarising microscopes that were useful in studying these compounds so that the manufacturing process could be improved. This led to some valuable patents.
These are striking images aesthetically…
Using cross-polarised filters to investigate the optical properties of various materials revealed the hidden colours created by the structure of the crystal planes. In the lab, I had access to a vast range of crystalline chemicals. Some I photographed just for their visual qualities, though my aim was to combine science and aesthetics without compromising the technical information in the image. Of course, that wasn’t always possible, but I noticed that the pictures selected by journals to accompany the scientific papers I was involved with were usually those that were most appealing to the eye.
[Left] © David Malin ‘Diphenyl Sulphone used as an additive in metal electroplating baths’
[Right] © David Malin ‘Anthrone – a reagent used for determining the concentration of carbohydrates’
I was with Ciba-Geigy for eighteen years. By that time, I had two patents to my name and several publications. I lectured at Salford Technical College and other institutions and was thoroughly enjoying myself.
How did your move to Australia and to astronomical photo-imaging come about? It seems like a big leap both geographically and in terms of field of study…
I was running my own department at Ciba-Geigy, offering specialist scientific services across the company: electron micrography, X-ray diffraction, cross-polar imaging and other techniques that depended on photography. The first of its kind in England. So, I asked the Director of Research if I could be promoted to Head of Lab. “Laddie,” he said (I was 34, he was a Scotsman), “You are never going to be Head of Lab here. Ye doon’t have a PhDee”. (I now have two doctorates.) I was floored and deeply disappointed. After a few interviews with British competitors, I noticed a small ad in the back pages of Nature seeking a specialist scientific photographer for the newly built Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia.
I was, by then, in my mid-thirties and married to an Australian. We had three young children and lived in a charming cottage in Cheshire. The Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) was looking for a specialist scientific photographer to operate and manage the photographic darkrooms at their headquarters in Sydney and at their four-metre [diameter] telescope, located some five hundred kilometres inland at Coonabarabran. My wife was very happy in rural Cheshire, but she missed her extensive Australian family. And, notably, the salary offered in Australia was almost twice that in England. So off we went.
[Left] David Malin ‘Working inside the prime focus cage of the Anglo-Australian Telescope’ 1976 © Australian Astronomical Observatory
[Centre] David Malin ‘ESO 437-G044’ © Australian Astronomical Observatory
[Right] David Malin ‘NGC 1531-1532’ [copy positive] © Australian Astronomical Observatory
What were the challenges of photographing deep-space phenomena in colour?
At that time all deep-space photography was in black-and-white. The commercial colour films of the day suffered from reciprocity failure. They were designed for exposures of a faction of a second, but the speed rating diminished rapidly with the much longer exposures necessary to record faint astronomical objects. Worse, the red- green- and blue-sensitive layers in the film emulsion each responded differently, so colour balance with long exposures was seriously distorted and could not be corrected. (All this was long before Photoshop.)
How did you solve these problems?
Professor Joe Wampler, the founding Director of the AAO, was very keen to show off his shiny new telescope, ideally with some colour images of the southern skies. By this time, I knew a lot about early attempts at colour photography, and I decided to try using a simple system suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and first employed by Thomas Sutton in 1861. The process involved exposing three separate black-and-white plates with different coloured filters to capture the red, green, and blue colour bands. Those three plates were copied to create positives and projected using separate magic lanterns with red, green, and blue filters respectively. When aligned, the three images gave the impression of single full-colour image.
[Left] David Malin ‘A bright Seyfert galaxy, NGC 1566’ 1984 © Australian Astronomical Observatory
[Right] David Malin ‘The Carina nebula’ 2008 from plates made 1979–80 © Australian Astronomical Observatory
For my version of this process, I made three separate long duration exposures which, given the fixed position of the stars and the tracking mechanism of the telescope, were identical except that each was made using a red, green, or blue filter respectively. Once developed, I used a simple home-made superimposition frame and enlarger to align the three images in register onto a large-format sheet of colour film. After much experimenting using Cibachrome (a then-new positive-to-positive colour photographic paper), I began to understand how to balance the colour of the images using a series of Kodak greyscales and colour patches as reference. Using this calibration, I was able to make the first true-colour astronomical images. All the colour images I made at the AAT (and those at the nearby UK Schmidt Telescope) used this process.
What did it feel like to see deep space phenomena like the Horsehead Nebula in full colour?
I was thrilled that such a simple process could produce scientifically useful images that were also aesthetically appealing. Revealing their colour gave much scientific insight into the structures of nebulae, galaxies, and other objects of interest in the night sky.
[Left] David Malin ‘NGC 2023 and the Horsehead nebula’ 1984 © Australian Astronomical Observatory
[Right] David Malin ‘The region around M8 and M20’ 1978 © Australian Astronomical Observatory
In 1986, you discovered the largest spiral galaxy yet identified, which now bears your name…
It appeared as a tiny little smudge on the black-and-white glass negative. But it turned out to be the biggest galaxy known – it still is – many hundreds of times larger than the Milky Way. But the strange thing about the galaxy is that while it is full of hydrogen, it hasn’t made many stars. So, it remains very faint. It’s called Malin 1 now.
The fact that you could register that faint smudge, as you call it, was the result of a process you had developed called Malinisation. What, in simple terms, did that involve?
The great challenge with detecting faint deep-space objects is that the light from even the darkest night skies overwhelms them. Added to this, the general chemical fog in the negative further masks very faint detail. However, photographic emulsion is a three-dimensional recording medium. While the dense areas resulting from bright objects penetrate deeply and the silver grains due to chemical fog are scattered uniformly through the emulsion, very faint images tend to be located near the upper surface. The method I developed was to expose specially hypersensitised photographic plates and contact print them onto high-contrast paper using diffuse light. In this way it is only the faint top layer (which is in direct contact with the paper) that remains sharp while the light hitting the lower layers scatters evenly. With careful control of the relative contrast and the sandwiching of several exposures, it is possible to clearly detect faint features that are invisible to the eye in the original negative.
[Left] David Malin ‘NGC 1976, M42 and M43, the Orion nebula’ 1999 © Australian Astronomical Observatory
[Right] David Malin ‘The Cone nebula in the NGC 2264 cluster’ 1980 © Australian Astronomical Observatory
That is an analogue process. How has the introduction of digital photography changed the way in which it is possible to make images of deep space?
After 1980, digital techniques gradually transformed the way astronomy was done. Stacking many separate digital images, for instance, did away with my analogue photographic amplification process. It also greatly simplified the creation of colour images. The last bastion of astronomical photography was that of wide-field telescopes such as the UK Schmidt, which used thirty-five-centimetre square photographic plates, covering a field of 6° by 6° of sky with superb definition. While that ended in the early 2000s, digitised versions of the plate were still available much later because of the telescope’s extended field of view. Many of my discoveries were made on wide field Schmidt plates, since the telescope had covered the whole southern sky. They were often followed up on the AAT, which was a much larger telescope and more versatile, but with a much smaller field of view. Ah! Happy memories.
Tell me about the David Malin Awards. How did they begin and what criteria are used in selecting the winners?
The awards were instigated in 2003 or 2004 by John Sarkissian, a senior technician at the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope. The idea was to have me judge the best images taken by Australian amateur astrophotographers in a series of categories such as wide-field, deep sky, the planets, twilight, and so on. I judged them by their aesthetic qualities, presentation, technical competence, and relative difficulty. Initially, I judged them alone but, as senility creeps in, I now share the judging with three highly regarded amateurs, all of whom have been previous winners in the competition.
What have you learned personally through making deep space images?
Patience. Persistence. An eye for the unexpected. And never be afraid to question.
Planetary nebulae are the ejected surface layers of a dying star.
Biographical Notes
David Malin was born in Summerseat, north of Manchester, England, in 1941. He holds honorary doctorates in science from the University of Sydney (1989) and from RMIT University, Melbourne (2003). From 1957 to 1975, he worked as a chemist for a UK division of the Swiss company Geigy (later Ciba-Geigy), specialising in optical and electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and the use of polarised light to explore crystal structures. From 1975 to 2001, he worked as a photographic scientist and astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory (now the Australian Astronomical Observatory) in New South Wales. In 1986, he discovered a giant spiral galaxy located 1.19 billion light-years away, now named Malin 1.
His images have featured in solo exhibitions in Australia, China, France, Italy, India, the United Kingdom, and the USA, and have also been editioned as prints, posters, and a series of Australia postage stamps. He has published over 140 scientific papers and a similar number of magazine articles for titles such as LIFE and National Geographic. He is author or co-author of twelve books including the monographs ‘A View of the Universe’ (CUP 1993), which won the Eureka Science Book Prize the following year; ‘Night Skies: The Art of Deep Space’ (British Council 1996); and ‘The Invisible Universe’ (Little, Brown & Co. 1999). In 2007, he was commissioning editor for the scientific imaging section of the Focal Encyclopedia of Photography.
David Malin has won numerous awards including the Jackson-Gwilt Medal (1986) and the Rodman Medal (1990), both from the Royal Photographic Society; the Progress Medal, the highest award of the Photographic Society of America (1993); the Lennart Nilsson Award for outstanding imaging in science (2000); and the Hubble Award of the Advanced Imaging Conference (2006). In 1998, he was elected Fellow of the International Academy of Astronautics and, in 2019, he was awarded the Order of Australia (AM). He lives in Sydney with his wife and family.
Photo: Oshin Zakarian
This interview is a Talking Pictures original.