JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) - About two and a half million years ago some photons shot out of the Andromeda galaxy, starting an unspeakably long trek through space.
Their journey started hundreds of thousands of years before humanity first began to control fire and, later, advanced to the Stone Age. But for some excited particles it more or less ended in 2012, when a few of them penetrated Earth’s atmosphere over northwest Wyoming and traveled through Michael Adler’s telescope. They reached his camera and gave him the data needed to create a detailed photograph of Andromeda’s spirals - one of his first images of the night sky.
“I was fascinated by it,” Adler said of the galaxy, which is the Milky Way’s closest large galactic neighbor. “I wanted to be able to create an object of that type of beauty.”
Adler, 77, is an astrophotographer. He has captured images of nearby celestial objects, like the moon and the sun during the 2017 solar eclipse. His shot of that once-in-a-lifetime event won him Wikipedia’s 2017 Wiki Science Competition. If you Google the eclipse, it’s one of the first photographs to pop up.
But Adler has also captured photons from all corners of the universe as he’s photographed all manner of heavenly objects: galaxies, comets and nebulas. Lots and lots of nebulas.
Showing the Jackson Hole News&Guide around his study at his home south of Wilson, Adler pointed to the images he’s captured of the massive galactic mounds of dust and gas. Those cosmic clouds are sometimes formed by the implosion of massive stars much bigger than ours. But other nebulas are where stars form. In some of those, dubbed emission nebulas, nearby stars excite gases in the interstellar clouds. When the gases return to a lower energy state, they emit light, enabling amateur astrophotographers like Adler - and the professionals behind larger telescopes - to photograph the stellar nurseries.
Such images are now a staples of Adler’s portfolio.
But he has spent only the last 10 or so years documenting objects millions and billions of miles away. It took years and a long career in engineering before he began cultivating his technical hobby.
Growing up in Michigan, Adler was always interested in astronomy, or the study of space beyond Earth’s atmosphere. He did not, however, pursue it professionally.
Instead he studied electrical engineering in college, went on to get a doctorate in solid state physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then spent 30 years working for General Electric in upstate New York. There he developed semiconductors, a critical part of computers as well as trains and wind turbines, and later went on to manage large groups within the research lab.
After retiring “right around Y2K” Adler went to work for a smaller company in New York and then with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. With over 400,000 members, that’s the world’s largest organization of technical professionals. Adler was the president for a time.
But these days the engineer is retired for real. He moved to Jackson Hole in 2000 and now serves on the board of the nonprofit Wyoming Stargazing, gives talks about terrestrial and extraterrestrial geology for the Geologists of Jackson Hole (he is also on the board), and documents the night sky.
Photographing Andromeda got him into it.
“It’s the furthest thing away that you can actually see with your naked eye,” Adler said.
But to everyday observer it doesn’t look anything like the splendid galaxy seen in his pictures. It’s a little smudge on the horizon.
Adler wanted more detail: “I just would see pictures of this type that other people have taken and I said, ‘Hey, I just would like to be able to do that.’”
He bought 6- and 14-inch telescopes - larger telescopes collect more light and, consequently, more detail - connected them to a camera, and started taking pictures from a cart in his driveway. He took his first photo of Andromeda in 2012 and two years later built an observatory on a second parcel of land he owns next to his home.
He has since given away the 14-inch telescope and bought two more - 12- and 20-inch instruments - and connected them to specialized cameras and laptop computers.
Operating the array is not like operating a point-and-shoot camera. The Earth rotates, which means the telescopes need to shift with it so images don’t blur. They do so automatically, but their motors aren’t enough to keep the frames steady. Instead the telescopes are equipped with two cameras. One captures the image Adler wants. The other zeroes in on a particular star in the field of view and sends data to software that makes slight tweaks to the scopes’ position so the star remains squarely in the camera’s field of view.
Taking the photographs is also laborious. Allowing enough light into the cameras for dimmer objects like faint nebulas require exposures as long as 30 minutes. Brighter objects like nearby galaxies require the camera’s shutter to open for less time: five or so minutes.
But getting detail around the edges of bright objects like Andromeda requires another trick: using a computer program to average the light and dark parts of multiple photographs. That doesn’t make the bright areas brighter, but it increases the quality of the image’s darker areas.
It’s immensely technical work that requires time, patience, money and skill. Adler thinks his background as an engineer helped him get into what he does now.
“I have a natural curiosity for trying to understand things,” he said, “and that came from living that kind of life and doing that kind of thing.”
Adler rattled off all kinds of facts about space. He talked about the stages of a star’s death, how the universe could eventually burn out or freeze, and explained that the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are easily observable from the Southern Hemisphere, are actually minor galaxies gravitationally bound to the Milky Way.
But units of time and distance factored heavily into his conversation with the News&Guide.
The nearest star system to ours, Alpha Centauri, is about 4.4 light-years away from Earth. That’s nearly 26 trillion miles.
Adler put that into perspective: “If the Earth and the sun were 1 inch apart, (Alpha Centauri) would be 86,000 miles away,” he said. “And that’s the nearest star.”
The majority of the nebulas Adler has photographed are about 6,000 light years away, but the farthest thing Adler said he’s ever viewed was 500 million light-years distant.
Looking at something that far away means looking at something unimaginably old on a human scale. Light takes time to travel, and it brings with it images of galaxies and other celestial objects from millennia past. Or, for an object 500 million light-years away, half a billion years in the past.
“On Earth, at least, the first multicellular life happened 500 million years ago,” Adler said.
Andromeda is much closer than 500 million light-years away.
It’s also near and dear to Adler’s heart.
As the first intergalactic object he photographed, it’s on his list to recapture. But this time he’ll do it with a larger telescope, and in greater detail.
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