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David Malin
The Man Who Colors The Stars
Like other great artists before him, David Malin is a great experimenter. Utilizing photographic film as his canvas, wielding a prime focus camera mounted in a cage attached to the Anglo-Australian Telescope as his brush, and with the entire cosmos displayed before him as his subject, David Malin has changed forever the way that we view the universe. The masterpieces in his cosmic portfolio adorn and beautify our world in books, and on posters, coffee cups, T-shirts, postcards, bookmarks, television, and postage stamps. Who has not seen his Horsehead Nebula image? It is captivating, the Mona Lisa of astronomical photography, luring us to contemplate what lies behind the seemingly calm exterior. David Malin is the world's foremost astrophotographer. He has given us a gift of rare and wondrous insight into the breathtaking beauty that otherwise would remain invisible to human perception.
Malin's legacy is one of color. His pictures are not only beautiful, but also valuable, full of priceless science. Utilizing glass plates 14 inches square, Malin takes three black and white exposures through separate colored filters of red, green, and blue. These are then superimposed onto photographic film, resulting in images of stars with their actual colors, thus giving an indication of their age, size, temperature and evolutionary history. Malin's images of nebulae and galaxies are a veritable feast of color and detail, painstakingly extracted from the glass plates with techniques he has developed. "There's color out there that explains the cosmos," Malin declares. The aim of his work is to unlock the information hidden within and behind the cosmic clouds of dust and gas to reveal a wealth of scientific insights.
David Malin's artistic ability to paint the universe is a powerful tool for scientific study. Science is the objective; the art is only a delightful result. But it is a result which helps make the cosmos more understandable for us all. Malin, sitting inside his prime focus cage with his back to the stars, listening to the music of Bach and Beethoven, bestows upon science an almost spiritual experience placing the details of rigorous research into the context of humankind's incessant search into cosmic distances for answers to ancient questions.
David Malin portrays the messages from the stars as scientist, artist, and astronomical historian. By producing images of the light echoes from the 1987 supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, Malin allows us to see, in rich detail, an event which occurred 160,000 years before Neanderthal Man emerged in southern Germany. Being able to see those light echoes, we are able to measure the rate of expansion of the supernova's resulting shockwave. Malin's paintings of starlight tell stories of ancient catastrophes, such as gas shell remnants around galaxies which show that two galaxies, trapped in gravitational warfare, have long since reconciled their fates and merged into one.
Even the world's foremost astrophotographer has to settle for his own small allotment of precious telescope time, usually 5-8 nights a year, and sometimes some of those nights are cloudy. In the twenty years that David Malin has been at the Anglo-Australian Telescope, he has produced fewer than 200 pictures, some of which have taken years to produce. Malin produces spectacular images even with an ordinary hand-held camera because he is constantly experimenting, exploring, and developing new techniques. His star trails are brilliant; some, which have been progressively defocused, show the stars as trailing plumes of stellar colors. David Malin gives us visual proof that color helps to explain the cosmos.
Photos courtesy of David Malin, Anglo-Australian Observatory.
