Art of Interference
S2E1 Ether: Transcript
ML: Maren Loveland
LK: Lutz Koepnick
GH: Gerhard Huedepohl
TH: Tori Hoover
JG: Jennifer Gutman
KK: Katerina Korola
JS: Josh Siegel
NK: Nina Katchadourian
EG: Erika Grundstrom
Introduction
ML:
“O tamer of all, O fire-breather, O life’s spark for every creature,
sublime Ether, best cosmic element,
radiant, luminous, starlit offspring,
I call upon you and I beseech you to be temperate and clear.”
LK:
These lines were composed sometime in the second or third century of the common era. Their author is unknown, but they are part of the so-called Orphic hymns. This particular one praises the god-in-chief, the god of gods, mighty Zeus. Or better: the lofty and luminous dwelling he shares with the stars, the sun, and the moon: the ether.
For the ancient Greeks, the term ether designated the upper regions of space, the heaven, a place so pure and clear only Gods like Zeus were permitted to inhabit it. The ether was all light, all bright, utterly blue. It was a place empty of matter, a timeless vacuum as we moderns would say, and yet the anchor of everything that defined the murky world of earth-bound mortals, our air, our atmosphere. Men of privilege—philosophers and poets—were able to get a glimpse of the ether, but no one could ever touch it, could smell it, or hear it.
TH:
From Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, this is Art of Interference: a podcast about creative responses to climate change. In each episode, we talk with artists and experts who work at the intersection of nature, technology, and science today.
Today’s episode, the first episode of our second season on air, is hosted by Lutz Koepnick.
LK:
Aristotle considered the ether as the universe’s fifth element, so powerful it in fact enabled the other four elements: air, water, fire, and earth. In the 17th century, Rene Descartes simply used the term of ether to describe space: it held stars and planets in place; its imperfections created particles and matter and eventually, our planet Earth. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche hoped to reduce five elements to four: for him, the gods’ lofty home in the ether was no more than a fiction, born by desperate humans to rise above the misery of their lives.
But it didn’t take bold philosophers to bring ether down to earth and merge it with the less-pure element of air. The rise of industrial culture—smokestacks, railway engines, coal fires in urban centers—they all tinted the sky grey and yellow and saturated the atmosphere with particles, dust, and pollutants.
In this environment it was becoming impossible to think of the heavens as something blue and transparent. We were trapped in the foul air, the poisoned atmosphere we created in the name of progress—air which obscured the clarity and luminosity ether had once promised. Air was all we had, and air increasingly lost its power to nourish, to support body and soul.
LK:
Welcome to our second season of Art of Interference. This season will feature artists, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, and creative media makers whose work addresses the impact of climate change on the element of air. You will hear about projects that engage with the wind, the movement of clouds, and the power of breath; that explore smoke and smog; that discuss the carbon footprint of the current exhibition system and the role of air conditioning for the contemporary art world; and that investigate the levitations of contemporary dance, its struggles with gravity, its desire to be and become air.
And as for today – we will speak with some folks who continue to reach out beyond the murky air, the polluted atmosphere of our planet in distress; people for whom the ether—the idea of utterly lucid visibility, of dust-free and empty space—remains a central focus of their daily life. They reside on Andean mountaintops and behold the sky with state-of-the-art instruments; they gather data about celestial events that far preceded human existence on Earth; and they picture the firmament as if no dust, no pollution, existed, as if our air amid all our climate emergencies still opened a wide-open window onto something called ether.
Who are these modern-day people who refuse the modern drive to collapse five into four elements? What inspires their efforts? They aren’t spiritualist shamans or leaders of occult sects; they are neither romantic dreamers nor distressed luddites. No, they are astrophotographers who picture powerful telescopes in the barren Atacama Desert in Chile. They are astrophysicists marveling at the beauty of what escapes the naked eye. And they are historians of photography who consider atmospheric dust as something that at once enables and obstructs impressions of such beauty.
As the celestial experts of today’s program remind us, our air—our atmosphere—is all we have. And human life’s spark will soon run out if we don’t succeed to stop its modern deterioration.
PART ONE
GH:
People often say, oh well, the desert is boring. It’s just gray and dust.
LK:
This is the voice of Gerhard Huedepohl, a nature photographer based in Santiago de Chile. For many years, Gerhard worked as an engineer for the Paranal Observatory at the southern edge of Chile’s vast Atacama Desert. Paranal was constructed on a remote mountaintop by the European Space Agency (ESA) in the late 1990s. Its four telescopes witnessed their “first light” in 1999. Gerhard was involved in the project from the beginning, overseeing its implementation and documenting the site: the telescopes’ ground-breaking operations and the spectacular desert landscape around it. Eventually, ESA named Gerhard their photographic ambassador, in recognition of how his images have brought science and art, the telescope’s technological assembly and the arid, seemingly otherworldly landscapes that surround Paranal into ever new conversations.
GH:
If you travel around and you look, you find a lot of life forms. If you go from west to east from the coast, you have quite some vegetation because there you have the humidity from the ocean, the coastal fog. But when you go over the coastal mountain range, which is roughly a thousand or 1,500 meters high, that’s whenthe real desert starts. And those are the parts where it is hard to find life. That’s also the area where NASA and ESA are regularly testing their Mars vehicles, but if you look carefully, you still find some life. So, if you turn around the stone, you might find a spider or a small scorpion. But that area is indeed really like very, very close to Mars.
LK:
The Atacama Desert is one of the driest spots on Earth. It sees many years without any rain at all. With the Andes towering in the East, its climate is ideal for gazing at the Southern Sky. No light pollution, no air pollution, low atmospheric turbulences, extreme high altitudes that place as little obstructions as possible between observer and observed. In fall 2023, Gerhard published a fascinating book called Very Large Telescope, and it contains hundreds of photographs he took of the observatory over the last two and half decades. Many of his images show Paranal’s telescopes from ever-different angles. Others explore the surrounding landscape: rocks, intricate plants, the shapes of the high Andes in the far distance, the otherworldly emptiness of the Altiplano. In some of his photographs, the Milky Way curls around the observatory’s magic mountain, the Cerro Paranal, at dawn or dusk. In most of his images, the light is stark and crisp without fail, transparent, as if emptied of air and atmosphere, as if Earth had overcome gravity and invited the viewer to levitate.
GH:
There are very fine colors in the desert, very fine tones. The problem is that we are at the tropic of Capricorn. So, the sun actually goes up almost vertical, up and down. It means the beautiful light conditions are very short. Typically, you have 15 minutes, not much more to get the perfect light.
LK:
Paranal Observatory is located at 2,635 meters above sea level—that’s 8.645 ft—, due south of the mining town of Antofagasta. Each of its four main telescopes has mirrors that measure 8.2 meters in diameter. In 2020, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy, based on observations and data gathered at Paranal. Such discoveries rested on very complex technology of data collection—optical systems that far exceed what individual cameras can do. As an artist, Gerhard is hesitant to call the work of Paranal’s four telescopes photographic. But, as an engineer, he is fascinated by their operations: how Paranal uses highly advanced tools to enable the clearest, the most crisp and transparent, the most ethereal view of the Southern Sky.
GH:
If you look at the sky, you see that the stars are twinkling. And that is not that the stars are twinkling, but it’s the atmosphere that makes them twinkle. So, technology has been developed,what is called adaptive optics. So, you send the light that you have collected with the telescope over a flexible thin mirror. And this mirror is then counteracting the waves that the atmosphere produces. So basically, if you look at the surface of a swimming pool, you see the, the little waves that you have there. So that’s what the atmosphere does to the starlight. It’s like what the modern headphones do with the noise that you have in the background. The other technology is interferometry. Basically, the bigger the telescope diameter, the better is your resolution, the more details you see. But of course you can’t build telescopes of 100 meter diameter or even bigger. So there’s a trick. You combine, the light of several telescopes that are at a distance of 100 meters or 150 meters—
LK:
that’s the length of about one to one and half soccer pitches
GH:
You can basically simulate a telescope of that diameter. The problem is that you have to combine the light waves between several telescopes. So, in an optical system that is below the telescope platform in a tunnel. You actually extend the light path between the different telescopes. So that in the end they all arrive at the same time at the detector. And that has to be very, very precise.We talk about the fraction of a micron of a thousands of a millimeter. It’s an extremely complex technology. And you have to take several images with different configurations of the telescopes. And then in the end, in a computerized system, you can recombine the data and create an image.
LK:
Paranal’s technologies of adaptive optics and interferometry put the physics of interference to work, all to counteract our atmosphere’s visual distortions. The clarity and sharpness of Paranal’s celestial images is a co-production of technology and the natural world.
GH:
The astronomers actually record data of the, or light of the stars or galaxies, and then they, decompose or they analyze the light and this way they can identify chemical composition of stars. So those are not images at all. There’s a spectra. For me, the telescopes very efficient data collecting machines.
LK:
No one at Paranal looks through a telescope’s eyepiece anymore, but Gerhard is keenly aware that his own photographs rely on complex technology as well. The nature of nature photography is manufactured; the lens of the camera doesn’t just substitute the human eye. For him, however, the trick, the challenge, is to resist the temptations of technology as much as possible.
GH:
Of course I do process them. I increase contrast and also take long exposures, which the human eye cannot. So the Milky Way on my images looks of course a bit brighter and more contrasty than your eye would see it. But I always still try to keep the images as natural as possible. Nowadays, you see quite a lot of images that are in my opinion over processed. They look extremely colorful and extremely bright. I’m a bit more a traditional photographer. The image still has to look somehow natural for me. That’s, that is important.
LK:
When you look at Gerhard’s images, you either enjoy or come to fear how much Paranal is off the beaten track. The next village, the tiny pueblo of Paposo, is 24 miles away, as the crow flies. Though some new weather patterns on the other side of the Andes start to affect the Altiplano’s light and dryness and heavy mining to the North has become a source of concern, Paranal is largely insulated from the impact of climate change and human interference. And yet, Paranal has seen quite some traffic over the years. The VLT’s hotel served as a location for the filming of the 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace. Brian May, of Queen, has visited the facilities, as has the Danish royal couple. Of all visitors, however, the stay of cellist Yo-Yo Ma stood out the most.
GH:
These are very exciting moments when you are able to meet celebrities that are visiting the place. It reminds yourself that this is a very special place where you work. A very unique place that a lot of people really want to come and visit there. The visit of Yo Yo Ma, that was really very special that he was interested in astronomy, in telescopes, in the universe, he talked to us. But then, he gave something back to us. He said, I would like to play for you under the Milky Way. And this was really a moment that gives you goose pimples when a world famous cellist is playing under the Milky Way–and you’re sitting there and listening .
Interference 1
TH:
Hey – Tori here. So can I just say – I’ve always wanted to see the Milky Way the way it is in the Atacama Desert. I mean, given the light pollution in Nashville, I’m certainly not seeing it here. And I wouldn’t mind hearing Yo-Yo Ma play either. Jen, what do you think?
JG:
Yeah, honestly, if it wasn’t such a barren place, you might think of Cerro Paranal as an ideal alternative to our polluted atmosphere.
TH:
It’s something like what the French theorist Michel Foucault once called a heterotopia: a place different from ordinary spaces that makes us question the norms, the practices, the expectations of our everyday lives. Question what we take for granted, but have somehow learned to accept.
JG:
Yeah, like the steady increase of CO2 particles in the air, of ozone, of nitrogen and sulfur dioxide, all caused by the emissions from burning fossil fuels. Though some progress has been made in recent years, long- and short-term exposure to what’s called fine particulate matter…
TH:
. . . or, dust, in layman’s terms . . .
JG:
. . . remains a huge public health issue. It leads to millions of premature deaths worldwide, asthma attacks, lung diseases, heart attacks, you name it. Not to mention the amount of particulate matter in the air affects weather patterns and can contribute to more severe weather events.
TH:
Gerhard’s view may be that these telescopic images are their own kind of special effect, but it’s fair to say that the blue and clear skies in today’s Hollywood films are kind of fabrications of a sort.
JG:
Perhaps that’s why Bruce Naumann didn’t even use a camera to capture the skies above Los Angeles for his late 1960s project Clea Rsky: the artist just saturated the pages of his book with varying hues of blue ink. And in one of his follow up projects, called LA Sky, Naumann trained his camera upward and documented the city’s polluted air. What you get are all kinds of yellows, dark yellows, and even ominous reds.
TH:
It’s a pretty far cry from how we have learned to imagine the sky. No stars or constellations anywhere. No crispness or transparency.
JG:
Yeah, it sort of hurts your lungs to look at these images.
TH:
It’s weird to think that particulate matter—the dust that is all around us—is largely responsible for the beauty of sunsets and sunrises.
JG:
Particulate matter is responsible for the fact that we see anything at all. Outer space is dark— not blue, not yellow—because light beams have nothing to hit upon, no other electrons to excite and kindle. What we call and often enjoy as “visibility” in the arts and elsewhere is directly related to the presence of dust.
TH:
While this might not be something we think about daily, it is something we’ve known about for a while. As far back as 1898, the meteorologist Alfred Russell Wallace was writing, that without dust, there would be no clouds in the sky, no cycle of condensation and evaporation: we’d live in a permanent desert.
JG:
And the stars wouldn’t twinkle, either, as Gerhard mentioned earlier. It’s actually the dust and the turbulences in our atmosphere that make stars look as though they’re twinkling.
TH:
Which makes you wonder whether poetic visions of the starry sky aren’t so romantic after all.
JG:
We certainly can’t live without our atmosphere, but even if we need dust particles to see anything at all, this shouldn’t offer anyone a free pass to keep emission going. It’s actually the opposite.
TH:
The question, though, isn’t dust or no dust. The true challenge is to have the right amount, to practice some – shall we say — art of interference that balances the needs of both the planet and humanity.
PART TWO
LK:
We rarely think of air unless it scratches our lungs, turns all yellow, or is on short supply due to prolonged exercise or extreme altitude. And yet, air has a history too. The composition of atmospheric gases has seen fundamental changes over the course of our planet’s existence. Giant creatures populated the Earth 300 million years ago because new types of plants dramatically increased the atmosphere’s oxygen levels and caused animals to breathe more efficiently, spurned their growth.
Human-induced air pollution became a large issue in the industrializing West during the nineteenth century and finally an object of political concern in the second half of the twentieth. The EPA’s Clean Air act was first released in 1963 and then significantly amended in the 1970s and the 1990s; its aim was to protect and improve the nation’s air quality and stratospheric ozone layers.
Some success stories can be told as part of the more recent history of air. The level of Carbon Dioxide particles in the air, however, one of the essential causes of the greenhouse effect, has steadily climbed. Clean air and clear skies remain precarious goods, the ancient’s ether never been more out of reach. Astrophotographers therefore, for good reasons, continue to travel to places like the Atacama Desert to capture unobstructed images of the heavens; and space agencies send space-based telescopes into the sky such as the James Webb to avoid the impurities of our atmosphere altogether.
Katerina Korola is a scholar at the University of Minnesota who investigates the impact of air pollution, of dust, not just on star gazers, but on photography in general.
KK:
I’m an art historian and media scholar, and in my work I look at the history of photography and cinema through an ecological lens. I’m working on my first book, which is called Picturing the Air: Photography in the Industrial Atmosphere. This book aims to tell the history of air pollution as a photographic problem. And by the phrase photographic problem, I mean both an aesthetic problem and a material problem.
LK:
Throughout its almost two-hundred-year history, photography has been fascinated with and haunted by air pollution. Photographers have sought to capture hazy skies, but they have also pursued the utopia of visual transparency: the clean and clear shot, the unobstructed view. They embraced atmospheric particles and dust to create stunning visual effects, but they also feared that dust could damage their cameras and film stock.
What is fascinating about Katerina’s research is this: dust and pollution aren’t just problems of what photographers capture. They also affect the camera itself. If photography was a product of industrial culture, then industrial culture also seems to be its biggest enemy.
KK:
Yeah, absolutely. We should keep in mind how photography contributes to creating this atmosphere. It’s an industry that requires a huge amount of extraction. It’s also a chemical industry reliant on coal and coal-based chemicals. Photographic factories are enormous polluters. Photography is the ultimate industrial medium and contributes to the pollution of the environment. On the other hand, thinking about the photograph being killed or sickened by the industrial atmosphere. It’s something I am really thinking about. But I am trying to resist the temptation to deliver this account of photography because I do think it’s important to recognize that a photograph isn’t being killed. It’s being transformed and that’s very different from thinking about humans who are exposed to the same kind of elements. And I think it’s like an easy slippage to kind of think of the photograph as an end rather than an indicator of a larger set of environmental conditions that affect human and other non-human entities.
LK:
In her research, Katerina emphasizes the currency of industrial pollution and smoke in the images of earlier photographers. In the twentieth century, though, the modernist dream of clear lines, transparency, and precision, extended to photographers as well. Some came to think of their camera as a tool to clean up the air—as if modern cameras could somehow reinvent the ancient’s ether. Others pursued creative, even poetic conversations, tensions, between the ideal of clear vision and the realities of our polluted atmosphere. The German photojournalist Elsa Talaman was one of them. She worked in the industrial Ruhr area in the 1920s, the center of steel and coal production,
KK:
and she was often using a smaller format camera than some of her largely male colleagues in the field of industrial photography, but her photographs have a lot more blur, contingency, these features that we might associate with amateurism, but that often give a lot of insight into the just material reality that’s elided from more professional photographs. There’s one in particular of a line of laundry hanging in front of this large industrial facility in the background that’s belching smoke, this white smoke and steam. And it’s fascinating because there’s a visual rhyme between the billowing flow of the smoke and then the way the wind has picked up the linen. So it’s asking you to make these comparisons.There is something very effective about seeing this kind of small scale attempt to maintain order in the environment, like domestic cleaning against the scale of industrial pollution in the area when it’s like, how long is laundry going to remain clean, et cetera. So, I think that’s another way where, like, already in the 1920s, we see photographers engaging with smoke and air pollution in a more than just romantic way.
LK:
It’s a long way from laundry lines of the 1920s to space photography today. But what modernist photography shares with astrophotographers like Gerhard Huedepohl is this desire for clarity and transparency, for air cleared from pollution. Though her current book project largely ends in the 1970s, Katerina is dedicating some thought to space photography as well, and what we can learn from the relation of industrial pollution and the photographic image about picturing things beyond our atmosphere.
KK:
Many observatories and scientific enterprises were sited in zones specifically valued for the clean air that industrial Europe didn’t have at that time. So, that’s another part of this history this desire for air and a longer history of often very explicitly colonial or neo-colonial strategies for obtaining the requisite conditions for a good exposure. As a historian of photography and a media scholar, the thing that most interests me about photography is how different photographs are from human vision. Walter Benjamin’s really wonderful phrase, it’s another nature that reveals itself to the camera as opposed to the human eye. It’s not just a matter of scale, like giving access to the very large scale or the very small scale, or the monocularity of the lens. These telescopes, they’re sensitive to wavelengths of light that are totally beyond human perception.
INTERFERENCE TWO
TH:
Alright, wait a minute here. Photographers, Katerina suggests, would be jobless without the atmosphere’s dust and pollution. Their cameras, their art, they flourish in a world that has done away with the purity of the ether.
JG:
What these photographers recognize when cutting through the dust and trying to capture the crispness of the sky is simply the fact that the world is much larger than the human world; that not everything on this planet should simply pivot around us, serve as a resource for our needs. Their desire for clean air, the ethereal, tries to capture a world other than ours in order to put our own into perspective.
TH:
A world much lighter than ours, in multiple senses of the word.
JG:
In his essay film Dust, the filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky offers intriguing portraits of people who fight daily battles with dust—only to realize that we can never truly be rid of it. It’s always there. “There’s always a trace you’ll never get,” Bitomsky quotes the French poet Raymound Queneau.
TH:
Which hits hard for me, as someone who feels like she’s constantly pulling out the Swiffer.
JG:
You’re not alone, Tori. And it’s not just us—many of today’s art institutions are hard at work battling potential disturbances from particulate matter, as if desperately trying to protect the human world against the larger-than-human.
TH:
The US-Armenian artist Nina Katchadourian did this amazing audio piece in 2016, an audio tour of the Museum of Modern Art that focuses on the museum’s daily struggle with all forms of dust. She lets us understand what it takes to dust the suspended helicopter in the atrium, investigates the building’s air-filtration systems, and discusses some of the particularly troublesome, dust‐attracting sculptures by Romanian modernist Constantin Brancusi.
JG:
Dust, it becomes clear, is modern art’s greatest enemy. A thoroughly unwanted guest. An invader we must keep at the gates to secure the value of good art. But then, Katachadourian’s own art piece also recognizes that some art can’t do without dust. In one of the conversations, Katchadourian and film curator Josh Siegel bring up the Bitomsky film, I mentioned earlier:
JS:
One of my favorite things to do at a very early age was to turn back and look at the projector and notice all the particles of dust that would be caught by that beam of light.
NK:
There’s actually something dusty about the medium of film itself. Film is made up of tiny silver salt particles stuck to a transparent base. It’s particles that form a picture . Or, as Butomsky says, film, that is dust, lighting up in the darkness of the movie theater.
TH:
Yeah, it’s kind of beautiful, honestly. So, can I take this as permission to just fully give up on dusting? Put away the Swiffer and learn to love the dog hair, perhaps?
JG:
Nice try, but no. I think the point is simply this: don’t believe you can protect art from all possible interferences by the elements. Instead, make art the site that negotiates a sustainable balance between the elemental and the human, the human and the more-than-human.
PART THREE
LK:
Ancient Greek philosophers considered the ether timeless: a site of eternal clarity, absolutely free of dust, housing the divine. When astronomers and astrophotographers look at the distant heavens today, what they explore is, let’s call it, timefulness instead. The sun’s light is eight minutes old before it reaches the earth. We see stars exploding millions of years after the fact. An ideal telescope would capture light so old it transported us back to the origin of our galaxy. Time is complicated. Different times, pasts and presents, are all around us. At all times.
EG:
We’re always looking at the past. Everything that we’re seeing in this sky right here is in the Milky Way or very nearby, so that’s all within a few hundred thousand light years of us.
LK
This is astrophysicist Erika Grundstrom, director of the astronomy lab at Vanderbilt University and her department’s director of outreach.
EG:
All of the stuff that you are looking at, It’s all stuff that has been around since humans have been on earth. We are definitely looking back in time.
LK:
She is a passionate science educator, touring the state with her portable, inflatable observatory to teach kids the wonders of the sky. I met with her on a somewhat dreary afternoon and she instantly managed to brighten the day with her talk about distant stars, nebulae, black holes, and the wonders of astronomical timefulness. I asked her to comment on some of Gerhard’s images, explain what she sees in them, describe their scientific value, but also their beauty.
EG:
The image is a long exposure photograph, and you can tell that because there’s so much detail. On the left, you can see two faint smudges, which are the large and small Magellanic clouds, but then kind of arcing through the middle of it is the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. So, all the kind of cloudy looking things that you see in this image are areas where dust is absorbing the light of stars behind it and those clouds of gas and dust are going to become, they’re getting recycled into new baby stars and new baby planets. So, whenever we see these gas clouds, we’re seeing stellar nurseries and planetary nurseries. People are really excited about looking at these things.
LK:
So, dust, light pollution, air pollution is something that you don’t want to have within the atmosphere. But once you discover gases, star dust, or pollution in outer space, you’re excited about it as a scientist.
EG:
Absolutely. Because we want to see what is out there that will help become building blocks for new planets and new stars. When we investigate the stuff that is in those gas clouds, which we call nebulae, we can sometimes find things like formaldehyde, or different amino acid molecules, the kinds of things that we would see here on Earth in life forms. And they’re just out there in space, just floating around in a cloud. So maybe they could end up being part of some sort of new planet, which is incredibly exciting.
LK:
Erika grew up in Minnesota; when her family moved to California, she learned that the Northern lights weren’t part of what people could see everywhere on the planet. Old books on Roman mythology triggered her interest in astrophysics as much as Star Trek: The Next Generation.
EG:
The television was mine on Wednesday nights at 9 p. m. Yeah, I was just obsessed.
LK:
Some of her research draws heavily on the data of Chilean observatories. Unlike Gerhard, Erika thinks of spectra and highly edited visualizations as images, as photographs as well. Like Gerhard, however, the Southern Sky over Cerro Paranal deeply fascinates her. Few other places on the planet, she tells me, allow astronomers to reach out to the stars, to almost touch upon them, as closely as the mountain tops of the Atacama Desert. Though quite forbidding, it makes her think of a world that somehow has managed to escape climate change. But dust and bouncing particles are complicated things for her. You don’t want them around your telescopes, the data buckets as she calls them. But once you detect them in space, things get interesting, in fact beautiful.
LK:
I have another picture for you.
EG:
That that one is Comet McNaught. That’s a very very famous comet for people who love astronomical photography, because it had such a spectacular tail. And it was in the sky for quite a while. And it was best seen from the Southern Hemisphere. I see some really cool things in this. So you’ve got the, the nucleus of the comet where kind of everything comes from. It’s this dirty snowball where ice as well as rock and metal kind of mixed in there. One of the really cool things about Comet McNaught is that its tail is just so long and it’s so curved
LK:
And here in this picture it so beautifully curves around the telescope itself, right?
EG:
Exactly. The other really cool things about this particular telescope is that its dome opens up all the way like a big clamshell. A lot of domes that you see have a kind of a slit, and it just opens up so you see just a piece of it. One of the problems with that is that you can get a lot of air turbulence just from the differential between the temperature inside the dome with the temperature outside of the dome. But using a clamshell design, you can get that whole telescope just out there and it equalizes with the temperature of everything. You get much more steady images. Seeing the actual structures of the telescopes there is really cool. Silhouetted against the beautiful sky.
LK:
What’s the material of the tail? Is this just humidity? Is this condensation or is this actually dust and rocks?
EG:
It’s kind of all of the above actually. But one of the really cool things about this kind of tail is those are all little particles. And those will continue in that same orbit. Every time Earth goes through one of these tails, that’s when we get meteor showers. The remnants of things that have been traveling through our solar system, maybe even hundreds to thousands of years ago. And every meteor you see is just a little particle that’s about the size of a pencil eraser. That’s that small. Yeah. Most of the meteors that you see, if it’s a fireball, those are fist sized and larger. They’re not really that big, but they’re going so fast through the atmosphere. It’s not actually them burning up. It’s how they excite the electrons in the atoms of the atmosphere to go up to a higher energy level and when electrons have to get rid of some energy they produce light.
LK:
Erika’s excitement about Gerhard’s images is palpable. Both are concerned with what terrestrial climate change does to the visible sky, both praise the otherworldliness of remote locations such as Cerro Paranal as one of the few remaining sites to transcend Earth’s messy atmosphere. What you need is the high desert’s thin air to reach out to the stars, to whatever may be left of the idea of the ether, to look back in time and in looking at the past see our fragile life on this planet in a much larger context. They have different ideas about what defines the beauty of images of stars above the desert, Gerhard insisting that it takes the art of unprocessed photography, Erika the painterly ingenuity of image synthesizers, electronic filters, and editorial decisions to produce captivating images for the larger public. What photographer and scientist agree upon, however, entails a curious paradox: The cleaner our own air and atmosphere, the more stunning the impression of celestial beauty created by the interferences of dust and particulate matter beyond our atmosphere.
Conclusion
LK:
In his deeply poetic essay film Nostalgia for the Light of 2010, Chilean exile director Patricio Guzman visited the Atacama Desert to explore unsettling parallels between different modes of historical inquiry. “Science fell in love with the Chilean sky,” he muses, then later cuts to an astrophysicist talking about his efforts to discover the origins of humankind and our planet, our solar system. But to this day, Guzman reports, people also still dig deep through the desert’s surface for the remains of the victims of Chile’s dictatorship during the last decades of the 20th century. Both astronomers and people in search of their loved ones, Guzman suggests, share something in common. They are all historians. They either look below or above the desert ground, the layers of historical time beyond our regular atmosphere, to come to terms with what defines their – our – present.
The atmospheric conditions of the desert—as Gerhard Huedepohl mentioned earlier in our conversation—strike visitors as Mars-like. Inhospitable, at first. Void of what it takes to sustain human life. Its air so thin it weighs on the body even when it succeeds in pleasing the eye of the camera. Many today understand the desert’s brown patches as an allegory of life in times of global warming, even if desertification is only one facet of environments in distress.
Today’s guests see it a bit differently; to them the Atacama Desert is a space of inspiration, of insight, a vibrant meeting ground of different pasts, presents, and futures. What they tell us is this: our atmosphere is a fragile zone between what is above and what is below. And in this, it is a place of ongoing struggles and difficult choices, of transformative hopes and painful memories. We can’t do without dust. Dust makes planets, dust makes light visible. Dust is at the origin of everything. Even art and beauty need dust, need some bad air, to come to life. The true challenge for our planet, however, and the future existence of life on Earth, is to somehow get the amount of dust, of impure air, even of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere right. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere will make the planet boil and us suffocate; too little will turn Earth into a snowball. The idea of the timeless and pure ether, as the ancient envisioned it, is perhaps no more than a figment of our human imagination. For all its attraction and promises, however, at heart it offers a powerful reminder that air and the atmosphere matter to our life on this planet. And perhaps as never before.
