Episode 18: Astrophotography with Andrew McCarthy

Written By Emily Olsen

Emily and Alexa chat with astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy about his work capturing the stars, rocket launches, and other celestial phenomena. Listen in to hear behind-the-scenes stories of what it takes to get the incredible shots McCarthy has captured of the ISS transiting the Moon, his collaborations with Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman and artist Cathrin Machin, and more! 

Andrew’s work can be found on his website at cosmicbackground.io. He is also found on Instagram at @cosmic_background and on X at @AJamesMcCarthy. 

Show Notes

Transcript

[INTRO MUSIC: “Space” by Music Unlimited]

Emily

Hello and welcome to the Art Astra Podcast. I'm Emily Olsen.

Alexa

I'm Alexa Erdogan.

Emily

And today we have a very exciting guest with us. We have Andrew McCarthy. Andrew is a full-time astrophotographer whose passion for celestial bodies and photography has led to some incredibly iconic captures of the ISS, the Moon, our Sun, and more. You may have seen his images online on his blog, Cosmic Background, Instagram under the same username, which we'll definitely also link in the show notes or under @AJamesMcCarthy on Twitter.

Andrew, thank you so much for joining the show today!

Andrew

Thank you for having me.

Alexa

So I guess right off the bat, I mean, how did you get your start in astrophotography?

Andrew

Well, it was really on a bit of a whim. Growing up, I was really passionate about space, but the way any little kid is. I grew up on Star Trek, and my dad had a telescope.

So my dad would sometimes call me out to the backyard and say, “Hey, come look at this!” and show me Jupiter or Saturn. And those were always core memories for me. I kind of had those growing up and often remembered them fondly and thought to myself, “Well, I should try to recreate that experience now that I'm like an adult with a job and can afford maybe to get a telescope of my own.”

So I initially found a telescope for free on Craigslist because I didn't have a lot of money [laughs], but I found this free telescope and I set it up in my backyard and I could see like a blurry Jupiter, but I was like really excited that I could see a blurry Jupiter. So then I ended up spending like 500 bucks, got myself a bit better telescope that wasn't falling apart from Craigslist.

Andrew

And then Jupiter just suddenly was like in high definition. And it was incredible.

And I pointed it to Saturn like right after that. Luckily, both planets happened to be positioned right where my backyard faced. And Jupiter and Saturn were close together because it was leading up to the Great Conjunction that happened at the end of 2020. And I saw Jupiter Saturn and immediately wanted to share that with people.I was like, “Okay, how do I share what I'm seeing through the eyepiece with my friends and family?”

So I think I had like, you know, whatever iPhone at the time, it was like an iPhone 6 or something, tried to take photos of it through the eyepiece and they turned out just terrible because it's just not…

First of all, it's not easy to do astrophotography in general. And then smartphones are just not designed for that at all. And especially the smartphones of that era. And so I kind of went down this rabbit hole of like, “how do I figure out how to share what I'm experiencing with the world?”

And I figured out that what people are doing was they're having the telescope act almost like a big camera lens that projects the image directly onto a camera sensor, which means you don't need like all the lenses and things in the way that like smartphone has or just even a point and shoot camera has.

So I took like an old camera body I had… something I got in like, it was forever ago. It was like the original Digital Rebel, like one of the first digital cameras that had a removable lens.

So I put that on, like I kind of just held it up to that eyepiece and took some like, longer-ish exposures. And I did that pointed at the Orion Nebula, which is a bright nebula that's in the Orion constellation in the winter skies. And when I did that, I started to see color. And that broke me, because I actually thought space was gray. Because for some reason, it's like the biggest misconception about space. People have this assumption that all the photos are just gray and that the color is added by scientists.

And that was what I thought, because I think a teacher told me that. [laugh]

And so I'm seeing a color photo, and it was super blurry because I was just freehanding this camera. But I'm definitely seeing the color. And I think I can track down that photo and send it to you guys if you wanted to share it.

But it's like--I was starting to see like a little bit of structure in there too, like shapes of dust and things. So not only did the color blow my mind, but it blew my mind that I was seeing shapes of a nebula because that was something I thought you needed a space telescope for. So my blurry little photo that I took through this telescope that was not designed for this immediately cleared up two major misconceptions that I had about space to begin with.

And then it just completely consumed me, like I went down this rabbit hole where every single night I was in my backyard, probably for 6 to 8 hours, and that was, I was working a full-time job then, so I'd get home from work, be researching things like cameras and how like adapters, the way to connect the camera to the telescope, and that...

But that was basically taking me through the wee hours of the morning where I'd get a few hours of sleep, then go to work again, and [laughs] and then come back and focus again on this all night.

And before you know it, I was starting to get some pretty decent pictures. And then I actually had a photo of mine go really, really, really viral when I was first starting to get into this. It was February 2019, and I took this photo of the Moon by combining different techniques I learned. One of them's lucky imaging, one of them's HDR imaging, where you take photos exposed for different elements separately and combine them. And then one of them is mosaicking. I did this. I combined all these techniques into one like super, super, super good Moon photo for me at the time. And it was like on the top of Reddit for like 2 days because just people loved it. People loved what they saw.

And my Instagram exploded. I went from like 200 followers to like 10,000 followers, basically overnight. And it just kept growing from there. And I was like, “Whoa, I have a platform now.”

So I felt like this responsibility that I need to get even better at this. And I started selling prints of that, and I made enough money where I could buy more cameras, more equipment and stuff without kind of cutting into my paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. I was a business operations manager at the time for a software company, and I thought I had a good career but it's still… it's not enough to just be spending thousands of dollars on telescope gear.

So I was able to kind of boot myself into getting better equipment and then starting to take better photos. And in doing that, I... I was able to kind of keep this flywheel going as people, more and more people kept coming to my Instagram, seeing my photos, getting excited because I was just a guy with a telescope in his backyard.

And I was clearing up the misconceptions for them that they had, you know, that space didn't have color, that you needed a space telescope to take photos of nebulas and things like that.

And then right before COVID, I actually got laid off. And then the pandemic happened. So I was basically stuck unemployed and had to figure out how to earn a living. So I went all in on space and that's kind of taken me to where I am today, where I haven't worked a nine-to-five since then because I went all in on this. And honestly, it's taken me to some incredible places.

Now I just, day-to-day, I am focused on whatever the next photo project is, which usually has a lot of different projects in the works. I have a couple telescopes in Texas at Starfront Observatories. I've got a couple telescopes here at my house that I run out of my backyard.

And there's things that I take with me on the road. I'm about to leave on a pretty significant road trip to try to take some photos out of the Midwest with some specific goals in mind and then down to shoot a rocket launch. Because rockets popped in there somewhere. I think it was November 2023. I saw my first rocket launch was Starship's second fully integrated test flight. And that became a new addiction for me, which is unfortunate because they don't launch anywhere near where I live. You know, that took me to being able to cover the Artemis II mission, which was just incredible, a very full circle moment for me. 

Emily

It is very much like a full circle moment, but it's been so exciting to see, to follow the images you've been posting online and how integrated you are with the space community.

And we do have questions, we have lots of follow-up questions about almost every category of what you’ve talked about. [laughs]  But to lead, of all of these, do you have a favorite image or a favorite celestial body?

Andrew

Man, that's really hard to say. Just because it's like, “Hey, which is your favorite child?”

[laughter]

I love it all so much. I can maybe break it down to like maybe top five, but it's hard to pick a favorite. One of them is definitely that Moon photo that went super viral and kind of got me my career. I don't think people can see what we're... what we're doing here on the video, but I'll show you guys. It's actually hanging right here in my office. But this is the photo that went super viral in 2019, kind of kickstarted my career. Just a very straightforward photo of the Moon that's just very difficult to execute technically because of the dynamic range involved.

But because this photo exists, this career exists for me, so it's a very important photo to me, and it was also hanging on the mobile launching platform for the Artemis I SLS rocket, so that's another reason why it's special to me, because it tied me into NASA and rockets in general, because that happened before I was even paying attention to rocket launches. And suddenly I was like, “I should probably pay attention to this, because my Moon photo is like on this like 40-foot-wide banner hanging off the rocket.” [laughs]

And yeah, so right after that, photos of that Artemis 2 mission, because that was like I said full circle moment for me. I was able to get media credentials, which is extremely difficult, very competitive. 

And with those media credentials, I was able to set cameras with sound activated triggers at the launch pad, which allowed me to get up close photos of the rocket as it lifted off, carrying the four astronauts around the Moon.

So very, very cool photos came out of that event. I think my favorite one's just like this up close shot I got of the engines, which you can see on all my social medias. And then there was one recently called “The Fall of Icarus,” where I captured a photo of my friend Gabe Brown. skydiving, he was free falling in front of the Sun.

And I did that in hydrogen alpha light so you could see the Sun's atmosphere. And I got him while he was in free fall in conjunction with an active region. So you don't just see the Sun behind him, you see a very dynamic feature of the Sun behind him. And that was just, I mean, first of all, I can't believe we did it.

Like, it's just like so many things had to go right to get that shot. A lot of planning had to go into it. We've been talking about doing it for a long time.

And It was the last attempt of the day when we finally got it. And so just incredible. And it went like super viral too, which is just always very gratifying. And I was putting it out there, I was like, man, this could go either way. It could be a big hit or it could flop.

And I don't care because I get my shots really for me. But it's nice though when you get recognition for something that you just pour so much effort into. Because a lot of times it doesn't go that way. So that's definitely a big one for me. 

And then I'll mention one more photo. So I guess maybe top four, not top five. One more is… it's called “A Visit to Tycho,” and it is the ISS transiting Tycho crater on the Moon.

And that one's special for me for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was runner-up for a photography contest, which is great. It was the Royal Museum's Greenwich Astronomy Photographer of the Year Award, which is what they call it. I got the runner-up for the “People in Space” category. But even better than that, that photo was photographed floating in the ISS cupola. So I have a photo of that picture floating in the ISS. [laughs] So that's a little piece of me that has made it into space. So for that reason, that photo is just very special.

Alexa

That's so surreal. So Emily had planned to talk with you before all of this, but also It was very interesting because I have a friend and coworker who I was talking to him about the podcast. He was like, “Oh, you know who would be awesome to have would be Andrew McCarthy.” And I was like, “Funny, you should mention…” And he was talking about “The Fall of Icarus.”

And I think he had recently ordered a print that he was like trying to find the perfect frame for. And he was in love with this picture.  Something that he raised as a question: for these type of like conjunction events, that must be a very involved planning process.

How do you think about and plan for projects where there's a transient event like the ISS and the Moon or Saturn rising behind the Moon, photographing an eclipse, these kinds of things? How do you work through that planning process?

Andrew

Some of them are much easier than others. A lunar eclipse, for example, is a pretty straightforward one. One, because it's visible from no matter where you are, just as long as you can see the Moon, you can see the eclipse, because it's not happening here. It's happening on the Moon. 

Solar eclipse: a little different because where you are matters. There's an actual path for that. And getting yourself on the center line is very important. There's one coming up that's in Spain that is a logistical nightmare to photograph, mainly because getting equipment to another country…there's a lot that goes into that. And you're competing with the millions of other people that want to see it too.

So I have plans for that, so we'll see how it works out [laughs]. But getting into ISS stuff… So the ISS is unique because I can't control what the ISS does. I can't control what the Moon does. And the ISS is unpredictable, too. So I say unpredictable, it's predictable to a point because we can get telemetry data from it. And the ephemeris, which tells us, “This is exactly where it's going to be based on its current orbital path.” 

You can plot that out into the future and go, “OK, in about a week's time, I know it's going to intersect the Moon.” But between that time, the ISS can actually boost. So they might run their engines for a little bit, boost a little bit, then suddenly it's no longer intersecting the Moon, or it's intersecting the Moon at a completely different time or a completely different location. But once I figure out that “yes, this is going to happen and it hasn't boosted, it looks like it's going to stay there.” Usually the day before, I'll double and triple check that I have all the station's data to make sure that I know for sure it is, in fact, going to intersect the Sun or the Moon when it's supposed to. 

And then I start scouting locations. Usually I just do that with Google Maps. I'll just pull up Google Maps and I'll have on one screen, because I got like a big old monitor, so I'll throw something on one screen where I'm seeing the path of the transit. Because it's like a solar eclipse where there's a very, very narrow path of land where this transit happens. And getting even more granular with that, what if I wanted to transit a feature on the Moon, not just the whole Moon? Because I shoot things at very long focal lengths. I can't even fit the full Moon in my field of view. So I have to pick something. A lot of times, it'll be a feature like Tycho crater, the Apollo 11 landing site, or just whatever I want to go for that particular image.

I did one where it was transiting near Shackleton crater, because that's where we're going to be going in future Artemis missions. So that takes a path that's maybe, oh gosh, less than a mile wide, and it makes it like, gosh, like maybe smaller than 100 feet. So I have to be very, very specific about where I set up my equipment at that point. 

So once I… plan the location. And there's a lot of research that goes into that, too, because if it's a business parking lot that I found, I need to contact that business, make sure they're cool with me, set up a bunch of stuff.

Last thing I need for security to think I'm setting up like a giant weapon on their property. Because if you don't know what a telescope is, like when somebody's setting it up, it looks a little suspicious. [laugh] And sometimes it'll be like the side of a road. And when it's the side of a road, I need to have secondary locations to set up. because, and this happens way more than you think, I'll get out and there'll be like a rotting animal carcass, exactly where I need to set up my telescope. That's a true story, that's happened. I almost stepped on it and I was horrified. [laughs]

And I'm not going to sit there and choke on animal carcass fumes while I'm trying to capture a shot, so I need to have a backup plan. So the backup plan has to be like within this very, very narrow slice of land. And sometimes it's very, very far away from location, sometimes up to an hour drive away. Because the way these transits work, they are a very, very narrow slice of land, but they're very long. And that transit could be potentially for 100 miles, this transit is going to be happening, where, you know, I could set up a camera at one end of the transit path and a camera at the other end and do fun like distance calculations or speed calculations to the ISS because the way it intersects the Moon at different times.

Anyways, I'm digressing here. But once I set up my equipment, I have to do that several hours in advance for that reason, because if I have a spot that ends up being bad, you know, maybe some farmer comes out with a shotgun and tells me I'm on his property, I don't know.

You never know what's going to happen. So I want to give myself enough time to set up all my gear and then potentially have to pack it up and then go to another shooting site.

If everything goes to plan, once I'm set up, I usually run all my telemetry checks again, just in case the ISS is boosted between when I drove down there and when I set up. A lot of times, that's happened. And usually what ends up happening is not that the ISS will miss the Moon completely, which has happened, unfortunately, where I see in the updated telemetry that the location's no longer good and I no longer have a location I can get to in time to catch the transit. But sometimes it just means that I need to change the pointing of my telescope.

So I'll just...choose a backup spot on the Moon to catch the transit or the Sun. If I was pointing at a specific active reach on the Sun, for example, and now I see the ISS has shifted a little bit and now it's going to be on a different hemisphere, I have to point my telescope there. And then leading up to the actual moment, usually I'll have a timer kicking down with a couple alarms. An alarm will go off maybe 3 minutes before the anticipated transit time. And that alarm reminds me to check the focus on my scopes because focus is constantly slipping, constantly changing.

As telescopes acclimate to ambient temperature, the aluminum tube will expand or shrink at a different rate than the rest of the components. So I'll have to adjust focus a little bit. And I'll also have to adjust the pointing of the telescopes.

One challenge of these transit shots is usually when I'm setting up for them, I'm not able to do a very precise polar alignment. That means my tracking mounts aren't properly aligned with the celestial pole, and that means they'll drift a little bit. So I'll check the pointing right before this transit and make sure I'm centered in the correct field of view over the Sun or the Moon to catch the ISS transiting that spot.

And then about a minute before, I'll start recording. And I'll have done tests leading up to this to make sure that when I record, I don't start dropping frames because I'm recording this in uncompressed formats, which is very memory intensive, so it's like usually many gigabytes are recorded during these sessions, and...It's very easy for it to start dropping frames, and if that happens during the transit, which has also happened to me, you just miss it.

I'll also have multiple cameras going at once for redundancy, because sometimes you'll get a technical glitch on one, and then you have another one as a backup that can still get the shot. I'll be recording on everything. Usually I try to actually have three cameras going at once to capture it.

I'll have one capturing with a global shutter monochrome camera. Global shutter is important with things like the ISS transit, because if you're familiar with the rolling shutter effect, what happens when something very fast moves in front of a camera that has a rolling shutter is there's a little bit of a readout delay between lines in that sensor. And as a result, anything moving fast gets warped. So you end up with an ISS that actually looks like somebody took it and skewed it.

So global shutter is really important. But the problem is with the global shutter cameras I have, they're all monochrome. So depending on the nature of the transit, sometimes it doesn't matter, because if it's like a daytime transit, the color will be washed out anyway.

But if it's a nighttime transit and it's illuminated, I want color of the ISS because the panels will actually glow golden.

Depending on, sometimes they glow like a blue color too, but they usually glow like golden depending on the pass, if it's a lunar transit. And it looks like really, really pretty in color.

So I'll have a second camera that does that. But that one, it has to be geometrically transformed to match the global shutter because it will have a skew from rolling shutter artifacts.

And then I'll usually have a third camera that is a wider field of view, and I usually use astro cams for the first couple shots, but I'll use like something like a mirrorless camera, like a more traditional camera like my R5 here, just recording like a burst shot during the transit, but of the whole Moon or the Sun rather.

And the reason for that is I want a backup in case the ISS missed my field of view. I want to know, “Did it transit the Sun at all? Or, the Sun or Moon and where did it transit?”  And then that gives me an idea how accurate my predictions were and I can correct for next time. So yeah, a lot goes into them. [laughs]

Sorry, I was probably rambling a little bit more than I needed to there, but it's fun to get into the technical details for the photography nerds.

Alexa

That's fascinating. Yeah.

Emily

I was going to say, do not apologize at all because we're nerds. So, you're good!

With how your process has evolved between when you first got that Craigslist telescope and now, you talked at first about how it immediately kind of helped you navigate past misconceptions. Is there anything more recently that you captured that you maybe weren't expecting to?

Andrew

Yeah, so the Artemis II capsule, the Orion capsule. Yeah, so I did manage to capture it. Went right after the lunar flyby. Like, that night, I was able to capture. It looks terrible.

Like, I almost didn't even want to post it to the internet because like the conspiracy nerds would go nuts because it doesn't look like anything. It's barely visible above the noise floor. But I actually thought it would be impossible. I didn't think that it would be bright enough. So there's hard angular resolution limits with telescopes. Like I can't resolve the landing sites on the Moon, for example, even though they're technically larger than the Orion capsule.

So the landing sites on the Moon are probably about a thousandth the size of something I can resolve with my telescopes. So like the Moon would have to be 1000 times closer for me to resolve them. And a good example of this is the ISS is 1000 times closer, and it's still not that well-defined in my photos.

Like, I get decent shots of it, but the ISS is still only like maybe 100 pixels wide. And that's with some of my best equipment. So, you know, people have this misconception that you can just point at a telescope and maybe see them, at least the people that think they're up there. [laugh] 

And unfortunately, I can't. So how am I able to resolve something that's smaller than that, that's about the same distance away in the Orion capsule?

And the reason is contrast. So when you have something that's very, very high contrast with its surroundings, such as an object illuminated by the daylight against the blackness of space, the light from that can stand out against the background noise. And that's, by the way, why we can see stars.

Stars are infinitesimally small from an angular standpoint. They're so small, they're considered a point light source. Like if optics were perfect and the atmosphere wasn't there, every star would be smaller than a pixel in every photo.

So the size of a star in a photo is actually a measurement of the optical error, which is an interesting photography tidbit for you. So that's what Orion did. It was a point light source that was barely distinctual about the noise, but yes, it was indeed visible. And that surprised me. 

So yeah, I was able to capture it. I had some peers that got way better shots than I did, though. Probably just better conditions, better optics, and they were able to get some pretty cool time lapses of the Orion moving through the frame.

Emily

That's absolutely fascinating. That's so cool. And it ties in with my next question, actually. So speaking of Orion and Artemis II, you have a really cool collaboration with the Artemis II commander, Reid Wiseman, and we'd love to hear more about it.

Andrew

Yeah, I still can't kind of can't believe this happened.

So In January, we're leading up to the Artemis 2 mission. I think I was like working on some Moon photo of mine. I thought to myself, “Man, it'd be so cool if I could do this on the backside of the Moon, like the Artemis 2 crew.” 

And it was like kind of a light bulb moment. I was like, “What's stopping me?” So Reid had already messaged me on X about something else. It was about another Moon photo. And I had the perfect pitch for him. 

I said, “Hey, what if we're able to get a shot like that of the backside?” And he was just, “Yes, teach me how to do it.” Like, “Let's do it.” Like, right away. Like, he was so gung-ho and very humbly asked me for photography advice on how to capture it and everything, which is crazy because he'd been like going through photography classes for like years at that point. So very humble guy, considering the position he was in. 

And so I kind of walked him through what my approach would be if I was one out there with a camera, which basically involves taking bursts of photos, identical photos, preferably exposed a little on the dark side, and doing it with a low ISO, always shoot raw, and allows the photos to be stacked, but the bursts had to be captured very quickly because their capsules, of course, moving very quickly, and there'd be parallax issues to contend with.

There was basically an actual photography plan put in place by their photography team that incorporated this. And that's why if you go through those 12,000 photos, you'll… like a lot of people are like, “Man, there's a lot of photos that are duplicates for some reason?” Yeah, that's like for that.

So the idea is once you stack these photos together, these identical photos, anything that's not identical gets averaged out. So noise is basically completely eliminated. There's a lot of sensor noise that is actually more intense than features of the Moon. 

So features like very, very subtle color data. Now, the Moon is, of course, mostly gray to our eyes. But if you're paying attention to the live stream during the flyby, they were talking about colors they saw. Like the Aristarchus Plateau, for example. They were seeing browns and reds and greens– things that are very, very difficult spot from Earth.

You can see some of these colors from Earth with a telescope. They're very, very faint. It takes some discipline to actually pick them out. However, a camera doesn't have the same limits as your eyes. Because you're able to throw a photo into Photoshop or Lightroom and play around with the saturation sliders, you can pull data out of photos that's not really easily visible at a glance. And once you have a photo that's extremely high fidelity, like these stacked lunar photos of the backside, you can just drag up that saturation slider and suddenly this entire world shows up of different colors, and it's the geological history of the Moon.

You can see things like invisible patches of iron oxide and titanium. You can see how old impacts are by how much color they have. Impacts that have kind of like this bluish tint – they're fresher impacts because they haven't been muted with space weathering. There isn't traditional erosion on the Moon, but there is space weathering that happens for micrometeorites, solar radiation. There's all kinds of reasons, like the Moon actually gets weathered, and the color that we pull out of these photos actually fades after a while. So when you're looking at the lunar maria, the big dark patches on the Moon, they're very, very vivid in color.

And then when you look at the highlands, those are the older areas, the more bumpy areas, and when you look in photos of the Moon, they're the brighter white areas. And those areas are much more tame. But because the data he brought back was so high fidelity, I was able to pull out color even from those older areas where you could see these massive patches of iron coming out.

And there was probably way more in it that I'm going to let NASA geology nerds go through and actually figure out what these actually are. But I was able to see colors in there that I've never seen before, like not on any of the backside data that we've gotten in the past. It was from LRO, maybe it was from Apollo. None of that actually had that deep of fidelity in the color.

So we're actually seeing stuff that's like potentially brand new science in there. So really, really cool stuff happened on the backside of the Moon. I actually just really wish more of it was illuminated because they did the flyby while it was a waning gibbous Moon on our end. That meant the backside looked like a crescent. 

So that's why during those Earthrise pics, you see the Moon as a crescent. That's the exact backside of the Moon. So you saw how little of it they actually saw.

But when they were on the Moon's, let's call it from the side, maybe from like a 90 degree angle to what we see, we're able to see more of… I'm going to totally butcher how to pronounce this because I only ever read it, but the Oceanus Procellarum, [laugh] I think? I don't know if I'm saying it right. It's the biggest ocean on the Moon. It's hardened basaltic lava.

And when you get towards the limb, a lot of the features start to vanish from Earth because it's so oblique to us. They were able to see it dead on. So I was able to resolve so much out of there. Craters that we usually just see like the edge of, I was able to see face on, and pull out tons of color out of those craters. So even though they weren't able to get as much of the backside as we hoped, I feel like they got the best parts of it because they also got Mare Orientale, which is like that big impact. It was from a 40-mile-wide asteroid.

A 40-mile-wide asteroid – it would have completely destroyed Earth. Thankfully, these impacts happened a very long time ago and we're no longer in the shooting gallery of the early solar system. But that whole area is fascinating geologically. Tons of color in that area.

You can see I posted some close-ups of that where you can see all these patches of brown and blue. Those are real geological features, maybe from ancient impacts or ancient volcanic activity. So yeah, [I] wish they could have seen more of the backside. But man, what they brought back is just so invaluable.

Alexa

I love the way you describe interacting with these images too as pulling out data, like when you're putting them in Photoshop and Lightroom. Because I think that sometimes that can be a misconception with the general public too, of anytime somebody mentions putting an image into an image editor or manipulator, that it's somehow being falsified in a way, when really it is just about...It is manipulation, but not with the negative connotation. It really is pulling out more information from the image itself.

Andrew

Yeah, I actually, I use Photoshop as an example just because it's what most people are familiar with. But, you know, because the saturation adjustment is just a saturation adjustment. So all you're doing is separating the color channels a little further.

And I usually actually do that in PixInsight, but since nobody knows what that is, [laughs] I just… it's not that much different than doing it in Photoshop.

But yeah, saturation is used to see actual data in the image. So I always try to really hammer home the point that, one, I didn't add any color. The color's already in there. All I'm doing is exaggerating it, making it visible to your eyes. Because it's visible to the camera, but if it's not visible to your eyes, then that doesn't help.

And then the second thing is: this is true color. This is not an example of a false color image. So the browns are really browns and the blues are really blues. 

It's not like when you're looking at a photo of a nebula and its Hubble palette, which is false color, which means it's now, the way it's been color balanced means it has greens in there that don't naturally occur in the nebula and et cetera, which is always another misconception because it adds to that whole thing that none of the colors in space are real, [chuckles] which is frustrating. But it's a complicated topic that I think most people are not qualified to talk about. So unfortunately, I see it wrong in a lot of science journals, which is sad. But that's what I'm here for: to help clear up those misconceptions.

Emily

Yeah. Bringing it also back to the full circle moment of switching to rocket launches. So you and I met at the Crew-11 launch where you had lots of helpful tips about how to shoot a rocket launch that I will definitely implement the next rocket launch I get to see.

But you were there at the Artemis 2 launch. So you were coordinating with Reid ahead of time. And what was it like to watch the SLS (Space Launch System) lift off?

Andrew

It's hard to describe. I've seen a lot of launches by now. I think I've seen dozens of them. And every time it's just magical. It's just… we're defeating gravity. We're going to space.

It's just such an incredible experience. So I hope I never take that for granted. But with Artemis 2, it was different because growing up, I had, I'd always learned about the Apollo missions.

My grandfather actually worked on the Apollo missions. So, I had a lot of stories from him and my father watching those launches growing up. You know, they could actually watch the Saturn V take off from the backyard.

And it was weird because it was like history, but it was also like, it was part of my family, it was part of my upbringing. And it felt like I was living history in that moment, watching the Artemis II SLS clear the launch tower, because this is our first step. This is our Apollo 8.

You know, this is the first step of this new generation of lunar landings. And it has enough inertia now and enough incentives that I don't think it's going to ever stop now. So when I saw the rocket lift up, one: I was thinking, “Holy cow, I was just texting Reid like 2 days ago, and he's in that thing that's going to the Moon.” And I'm like, which is like a weird feeling. And 2: it's like I was actually here for this historic moment. And I saw it with my own eyes. I wasn't reading about it on a blog or in a magazine. 

I'm actually here to witness it. And of course, getting the photos is like my dream. Just as a photographer, my goal is to always capture things and share them with the world. 

So, yeah, it's very hard to describe. There's actually audio of me, like some other people shared because they're behind me recording. And the whole time I'm just like, “Oh, my God.”

Like, you're just so emotional in the moment that, like, nothing coherent comes out of your mouth. You're just… I was probably making just noises, just “uhhhh” [laughter]. It's just so incredible.

And then, at some point I just… I lock in and I focus on my camera again. I actually forgot to hit record on one of my cameras. I would have had a really great tracked video of the whole thing going up, but I didn't even hit record on that camera because I was just so like, in the moment when it was launching, I almost couldn't even believe it. I was just like, “Whoa, they're actually going. This whole thing wasn't like a big prank.” So yeah, I was very surprised too. You know, it went on their first proper attempt.

So yeah, just amazing. Such an improvement over Artemis 1, and that's why it's so important to get cadence up with these launches too, because you do lose it. You know, it was a very painful process again to recover from not doing lunar missions for as long as we did. All the facilities that we used to create the Saturn 5, like, all vanished.

The only reason I think this went as smoothly as it is because we were using infrastructure from the shuttle to launch these missions. You know, there's a lot of people that criticize the way that the SLS was engineered and designed. But I have to say, if it wasn't designed the way it was, it probably wouldn't have even happened. So I have to be thankful that smarter heads than mine looked at this problem and knew how to solve it and made it happen.

Alexa

As you've been talking, too, it sounds like there is a really important throughline of community through it as well. Like, you were mentioning your peers in astrophotography and the shots that they've taken, that you've looked at online, this community of people on Instagram, for example, that have interacted with the photos you've taken… The launch community, other people around you all being together, witnessing something so beautiful, so magical, I think is a perfect word for it. What would you say is your favorite part of the space community, whether that's online interactions and or in person? And is there anything that surprises you or has surprised you about the space community?

Andrew

So the space community in general is actually almost opposite when you look at the difference between the astrophotographers that I know and the rocket people that I know – very different personalities, which is fascinating. The astrophotographers, it's almost like a very introverted hobby. It's like you're sitting there in your backyard by yourself with a telescope. It's,you know, they'll do star parties and things. They will mingle. But the day-to-day, it very much is a solitary thing. And the rocket thing is the opposite because you are in big groups going and shooting these things. There's always tons of people around. So very different personalities, I think, are attracted to each. It's kind of weird that I'm kind of involved in both, honestly.

I mean, there's definitely more people like me that do both, but it's fascinating to see just how different the people are in each community. And they're all great. I'm not saying that one group is bad, one group's good. It's just very different personality types.

One thing that I will say stands out about people in the rocket community: there's not a single person that's involved that doesn't think really, really big. I think that's important. I think we're all to a point, and when I say “us,” I mean humanity in general. We've all become less… I want to phrase this in a nice, optimistic way, and it's hard. But it's like I think we've all become a little bit more isolated than we used to be, and probably because we interact with most people through a piece of glass in our pocket. It's maybe a little less face-to-face, and I think we lose something. And it makes us, I think, maybe think a little more short-term. And a lot of that is maybe economic related, like, “Where am I going to get my next paycheck? Where am I going to get my next meal? Am I going to make rent?” You know, these types of problems make it really hard to think big. 

But I don't see that whatsoever in the rocket community. Because, even if they're struggling, they're looking at this as our future being built. So it's an investment in our future. So even if it's painful on the short term, the payoff will come. And there's already a lot of good that's come out of the space program, and they recognize that. Just examples from Apollo: we wouldn't have microchips at the scale we did if it weren't for Apollo. We wouldn't have MRI machines.

There's a lot of things that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for our ventures to set foot on the Moon. And now with the advent of reusable rockets, now we're getting satellites in the sky that aid in our communication.

And that might not seem like that big of a deal to everybody that has Verizon or AT&T and it gets a decent cell signal, but most of the world actually is not connected like that because you need to run cables, very, very expensive cables into all these areas to get communication. And now, thanks to Starlink, you don't need to do that anymore.

So the barrier for entry for internet is no longer billions of dollars to dig these miles and miles and miles of cables to get it to, like, some tiny village that would have never had it. So, space and specifically commercial spaceflight taking off like it did is actually going to elevate the entire global economy in very, very unpredictable ways. Connecting people, allowing them to participate in the global economy by just giving them internet is such a huge difference.

And it's very, very hard to imagine just how much different we'll be in like 20, 30 years just because of that one thing. But then with the Artemis program, what's going to happen when we start having people living and working on the Moon day-to-day? We're going to have access to interesting things like helium-3 for fusion reactors. Fusion technology could completely change the way we handle electricity.

When we have massive amounts of infrastructure in the sky, it turns into its own little economy.

How far out are we from our first space hotel? Probably not that far, because there'll be an economy in space, and people want to capitalize on that. And then tourists will be probably on the early end of things, but it won't be that long before you start to see an economy between Earth and the Moon, where people will be living on the Moon, spending money on the Moon and it'll start growing, almost like a town in the desert, starting to take off because people start moving there for work.

So very interesting, very exciting future. And definitely something about that community that sees that and understands that and respects it, and it's really exciting.

Emily

It's so cool to think about it at that scale, especially given, and you've pointed this out before, like it was 52 years, I think, since we were last on the Moon. And that was Apollo 17, but of course, Apollo 14 was the first mission where we had essentially ‘70s equivalent of high resolution cameras on the lunar surface. And just to see how much ground we've covered in all sorts of technology and how we've been able to relate that to life on Earth is just the coolest thing ever.

Andrew

You know, I think we're going to be inspiring so many future astronauts and engineers and astronomers just with the images coming back. I mean, already, like that photo of Earth that Reid took out the window on what was it, like day one of the mission? That alone is enough to inspire millions of people.

So when there's photos coming back from Shackleton crater of Earth low on the horizon, and you know you're going to get astronomy geeks on the Moon working that are going to be setting up telescopes that handle the lunar environment. It's going to be a complete game changer for just imagery alone, which just does so much for inspiring us and getting us motivated.

That's where you get the best aerospace engineers. You motivate them when they're kids, and then it becomes a passion that carries them through their entire life. So much is going to come out of this that's so exciting.

Emily

Also, another element of the space community: we've mentioned your various collaborations and the space community online, especially on the social media platforms, enables a lot more of that. But one of the collaborations I was especially excited to talk to you about is your work with the astro painter, Cathrin Machin. Can you tell us about that?

Andrew

Oh yeah, for sure. Well, first of all, I've been friends with Cat for like years. She was very kind to me when I first got into this in like the 2019 era, when I was still feeling my way through. She was just doing painting. She didn't do any astrophotography yet, but she was helping me just learn how to do this for a living, like how to sell prints and stuff, because she'd gotten really good at it. 

So we'd always wanted to do something together, especially now that I feel like, you know, I could kind of punch above my weight in terms of producing something that people will want to buy. So partnering with Cathrin is just a natural thing.

We'd had some really crazy ideas. And then there was one day I was thinking about it. I was like, “You know what? I'm really struggling with this photo. But you know who I bet wouldn't struggle with it? I bet Cathrin wouldn't struggle with it.” So, I gave her the raw data for this mosaic I was working on.

So I wanted to shoot a really high resolution photo of the Pillars of Creation and the areas around it. So most people know the Pillars of Creation from that famous Hubble photo that made it famous in the 90s. For me, it personally inspired me when I was a little kid. But they don't necessarily know the area around it so well, but there's a lot of really cool things happening around it as well, so I took this giant mosaic using a twelve-inch telescope out of my backyard, and I'm putting together the data, and with nebulas, I touched on false color earlier.

It's a color balancing technique, is what the false color is. And basically nebulas are naturally a very, very like saturated red. So if you ever take a photo of the Milky Way, you'll see little splashes of red in there. Those are nebulas. It's the hydrogen gas gets ionized and glows fluorescent. It gets like this very, very specific shade of like pinkish red when it ionizes.

And it's so bright and the hydrogen's so abundant that it basically overwhelms everything else in the nebula. So all you see is like this one shade of red over the entire nebula.

So what Hubble Palette does, it's actually called narrowband imaging. What we do is we take filters, instead of like the regular RGB filters that every digital camera ever in existence has, it has hydrogen alpha, ionized sulfur, and ionized oxygen filters.

And we call that SHO, S-H-O. And what that does is it isolates the ionized sulfur, which is one shade of red; the ionized or hydrogen, which is a slightly different shade of red; and then the ionized oxygen, which is like turquoise. And when we map those colors, we map them to RGB. Even though it's RR turquoise, it turns into RGB.

So we shift the oxygen to be completely blue. The sulfur stays red, and then the hydrogen turns green. And everything is kind of color balanced individually. And what that does, that gives you a photo that has much more visual information. So instead of just that single cast of red, you now have pockets of blue, pockets of green, pockets of gold, and they all mean something because you're actually seeing concentrations of these different gases.

And where I was struggling was with the color balancing, you almost end up blowing out the core. I needed the pillars to look really, really, really good. And they looked bad when I color balanced for the outside of the image. But when I color-balanced to the inside of the image, the outside of it looked terrible. So I asked Cathrin. I was like, “I am hitting a wall with this. I want this to be amazing. I've already dumped like hundreds of hours into this. Maybe you have better luck.”  And she spent like, I don't know, like several weeks on it, I think.

And she’d just given birth, too. [laughs] So she had like a baby in her lap and then she's editing this photo. And one day she texts me and it's the photo that she'd been editing.

And I'm just like, “Oh my God, you did it!” It was just…it was perfect. It exceeded my expectations.

I don't know what she did, but she worked some magic on it and was able to bring out all this color, natural color that's in the nebula. And then the pillars still looked really, really, really good. So that ended up being our collaboration. Basically, it was my shooting and her just eye for color. And we were able to get that photo out. So basically what she did, her contribution, it sounds so simple. It was basically color balancing [laugh]. But it is so important with this type of astrophotography. She was amazing. And I'm actually trying to collaborate with her again soon. So we're hopefully going to come up with something else pretty cool here soon.

So yeah, very excited to collaborate with her. She's very, very gifted also on the marketing side. I felt actually like a slacker because you know, the way these work, we're selling prints and we kind of split the profits, right? And she's like, hamming it up on social media, like “Come check out our print sale” and everything.

And I'm just like, “Uh, Here's a photo of my cat, I guess. Buy my prints.” [laughs] And she's like very good about the marketing too. So if you ever watch her, she's very, very smart about how she approached it.

And get on her mailing list too, because her emails, like her marketing emails are fantastic.

She does like a little… like a crappy space joke and every single one of them, it's great. Anyways, shameless plug for my friend Cathrin’s mailing list. [laughs]

Alexa

No, that's a very unique skill, just like marketing and social media. 

Andrew

Yeah, my cat, thankfully, is very popular on social media, so I can use him to help me market.

Emily

No, that's a skill. I'll definitely make sure that we have Cat’s socials and the newsletter in our show notes as well.

Andrew

Oh, cool.

Emily

Yeah, it was so funny because I've been following both of you for, that sounds so creepy.

Andrew

…not physically followed! [laughs]

Emily

I've been following both of you on social, online for a while as kind of a lurker on Twitter, now X and Instagram. I was so excited when I saw that you two were collaborating. So I'm really excited to hear that there will be more.

Andrew

Yeah, we're already working on our next one. So I mean, very early still. So we'll see. Hopefully, hopefully we've got something good coming this summer.

Alexa

When it comes to the actual execution of astrophotography here on Earth, what kind of factors have you found in your experience really limit doing effective astrophotography on Earth?

Andrew

So for one, Earth gets in the way. So Earth itself is, of course, annoying when, for example, let's say I'm shooting an object that's very low on the horizon. I get very limited time because Earth just gets in the way.

A tree line or something starts blocking the image, so I can't shoot it all night. And then, of course, what you can see is determined based on your latitude, because as we all know, Earth is round. As you move further south, you see different skies. So there's objects such as the Carina Nebula, which is an incredible nebula. I can't shoot that from where I live.

If I want to shoot that, I have to fly to the southern hemisphere. The large and small Magellanic clouds, those are not visible from my latitude. So very, very annoying that Earth gets in the way. And then also, of course, you have atmosphere.

So atmosphere has optical attributes to it. So it has a refractive index that changes based on the air's density, the temperature, the way it's moving. There's all kinds of things that affect the way the air refracts light. And that's why stars twinkle. So when you're looking at the stars, you see them all twinkling. That is atmosphere. Makes a star super pretty. 

But very annoying for an astrophotographer, because when I am like trying to get that high resolution image of the ISS or Jupiter or Mars, angular resolution is actually not even limited by my telescope usually. It's limited by atmosphere because I have to pay close attention to something called the seeing forecast, which has nothing to do with clouds or anything. It's literally what the upper atmosphere is deciding to do in terms of moving.

So if you have a big temperature differential between layers of the atmosphere, they'll start dumping into each other and mixing around. And then when you look at it through a telescope, it just looks like soup.

You know, there's Jupiter loses definition and is wiggling in the eyepiece. So taking photos of it turn out blurry. So that atmosphere makes it really, really, really challenging. And that's why most observatories are generally very, very, very high altitude, positioned on the top of some of the tallest mountains in the world, because they want to cut through as much of the atmosphere as possible. And that also, of course, gets you above the clouds, which are another annoying fact about having an atmosphere. The atmosphere is great at keeping us alive, but very annoying when it comes to letting light from distant galaxies enter my telescope. So yes, those two things, Earth getting in the way, and then The atmosphere are two big ones. But then also you have your fellow humans to deal with, too.

Light pollution is a big, big problem. And that ties into atmosphere too, because it's actually the light bouncing off the atmosphere that causes the light pollution. Like let's say if I was shooting on a lunar city, it wouldn't be a problem because there'd be no atmosphere to scatter the light.

But as it stands right now, I'm actually in a pretty remote area where I live. But the light domes from nearby cities, when I say nearby, I mean like 50 miles away. It's still enough to obscure different objects depending on what I'm shooting.

And then of course you have gravity, which makes it very, very cumbersome to put a big giant telescope on top of an equatorial mount. So that's why I have a bad back. [laughs] So, there's another reason Earth is annoying sometimes. But thankfully it makes up for it by being very beautiful.

Emily

Yes, light pollution is one of the bummers about living in New York, whereas I get all of these updates about astronomical phenomena.  And it's like, “I will not be seeing any of these.” Sometimes! But it's very rare.

Andrew

Yeah, it's absolutely very frustrating to live in a light polluted area. But I will say, don't rule them out, because I actually got my start living in Sacramento. So Sacramento was very, very light polluted, but I was still able to capture nebulas and galaxies from my backyard in Sacramento. So, you can do it. So definitely don't rule it out. Very many misconceptions about what I do, and one of them is that it's impossible based on where you live when that's absolutely not the case.

Emily

Perfect. That's also just a random plug: depending on where listeners are, there may be lots of local astronomy clubs and telescope clubs, because there are a few in New York as well. 

Andrew

Oh, yeah?

Emily

Yeah! But you've mentioned setting a telescope up on the Moon a couple times now, or a lunar city. Would you go to space? Would you be one of those astronomers?

Andrew

Oh, yeah, in a heartbeat. I mean, one of my bucket list shots, and I still see it as attainable, is getting Earth and the Moon in frame together. Yeah, like, and when I say Earth and the Moon, I don't mean like the Moon rising behind a mountain range, because technically that's true too. I mean the entire Earth. 

[laughter] 

Andrew

So however that works out, I have to. But I would have to go pretty far into space to get that, like an Artemis 2 type mission. So yeah, definitely I would go into space in a heartbeat.

I do love this planet I live on. I think it's beautiful. It's amazing. We're very lucky to have this planet. I'm not a person that thinks that like, ”Oh, like living on Mars would be way better than living on Earth.” No, Earth is awesome. But I would totally go to the Moon for like a few weeks and be like, checking out the astronomy there. I'd be getting photos of Earth on the horizon. And plus, just to say I did it, like bragging rights. Like, “Hey, I went to the Moon. Who wants to high-five me?” I don't know, like it'd be very, very exciting. Like the very sci-fi version of climbing Mount Everest. [laughs]

Alexa

No, that would be so, so rad. I can't even fathom. My mind is going so many places of like what a lunar city would look like and having star parties on the Moon. That sounds really, really cool. You mentioned a couple of times throughout our talk, some misconceptions or like advice for people who would be interested in astrophotography: living in a city not being such a huge limiting factor, as you mentioned earlier. Do you have any other advice for people who are interested in photography, specifically astrophotography and or launch photography, getting more involved in that sort of realm of the space community, things like that?

Andrew

Yeah, one of them is just seeing where your passion takes you. First of all, astrophotography is really, really hard. And I don't want to gatekeep it because anybody can do it, but it's one of those things that it might not be right for everybody because you really do have to invest a lot from a matter of, not just money, but time too. I kind of mentioned earlier that it consumed my life. And that was how I was able to kind of get to where I've been is because everything else in my life faded away except for astronomy, and that's why I was able to do it. And not everybody has that passion, which is okay.

It's okay to like space, but not love it to the point where you're willing to sacrifice everything else in your life for it. Like it's totally okay. But this is accessible and it's only gotten more accessible as we've gotten on. Now you can get like a $500 scope, like a smart telescope, that allows you to get photos sent right to your phone. That didn't exist when I got into this. There's very much accessible ways to get it into astrophotography now. That scope I'm referring to, by the way, is called a Sea Star. I think the S30 is like 500 bucks. You're not going to get award-winning photos with it, but you will be able to go like, ‘Oh, let's see what's in this star cluster” and do some long exposures and start to see a nebula and that type of thing.

There's ways to get into it for relatively cheap now. And like I said, you can do this from the city, too. So I would assume if you have an excuse in your mind why this isn't going to work, assume it's wrong before you assume it's right, because it probably is wrong. Everything I thought I knew about this was wrong. Everything. And because I was able to kind of stick with it, despite my assumptions going into it, I was able to kind of capture the things I've been capturing, which is pretty much anything. You can truly capture essentially anything so long as Earth is not in your way. Because light doesn't stop traveling. I can capture galaxies in the Coma cluster.

I can capture gravitational lensing. I can capture most of the things that Hubble has taken pictures of. There's not really a limit. [laughs] You can do pretty much anything. It's just how hard are you willing to work towards it? So if you have clouds, not much I can do for you. But if you don't have clouds, light pollution is not the end of the world. It just means you need to spend much more time shooting the objects. So I guess my advice would be don't give up if you're thinking about getting into this. And it's hard at first. But if you do give up, maybe it just means it wasn't quite right for you, and that's okay. But if you have the passion for space, just know that the problems that you face are all solvable. Then you can do this from anywhere in the world, truly anywhere.

Emily

That's so exciting. One final question as we wind down: what are you working on now, if you are comfortable sharing with us?

Andrew

Well, in a couple days, I'll be leaving to go do some sprite hunting. So I don't know if I'm going to succeed or not succeed, but I figured this was a good time of year to try to catch some storms low on the horizon and, you know, maybe some stars above them and see if I can capture some sprites. So if you don't know, sprites are a very rare weather phenomenon where you see these like red bursts shoot out of the tops of clouds like way up into space. And they're very, very fleeting. In fact, they weren't captured on camera and they were thought almost a myth until not that long ago. I think it was like the 90s or something when we first saw them on camera. So very, very rare to capture, but some people have gotten really good at finding them. 

And so I'm kind of feeling inspired and maybe a little lucky. I'm going to set up some cameras and just go nuts shooting storms and see what happens. And if I don't catch sprites, hey, maybe I'll see a tornado or something. But then after that, I'm heading down for hopefully Flight 12's successful launch of Starship. So Starship has a completely redesigned ship now. It's called the V3, the third iteration of Starship..

But my plan is to drive down, get photos of Starship in flight, hopefully get some good photos from the pad, and hopefully my cameras don't blow up, and maybe some sprites, too. So we'll see. So, some interesting things that I'm working on over the next couple of weeks.

Emily

That's so cool. Andrew, thank you so much for chatting with us this evening! This was so informative.

Alexa

This has been lovely. Thank you so much.

Andrew

It's my pleasure. 

[Outro Music: “Space” by Music_Unlimited]

Emily

Thank you for listening to today’s episode of the Art Astra Podcast.The transcript for this episode and show notes are available on our website at www.artastra.space. 

Alexa

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review on Apple or Spotify. This helps other listeners find our show. If you’d like to learn more about image processing, which Andrew briefly touched on, we recommend checking out one of our earliest episodes in which we spoke with Jason Major about what goes into processing an image from space. 

Emily

Towards the end of our interview, I referenced local astronomy clubs. If you’re in the New York City area like me, there’s the Amateur Astronomers Association, which is worth checking out at aaa.org. 

Some of the images Andrew mentioned are also featured on our social media for this episode. Follow Andrew at on socials @cosmic_background on Instagram and on x or twitter,  @AJamesMcCarthy. You can also follow us on social media at @artastrapodcast. 

Catch you later!

Alexa

See you later! 

[Outro music: “Space” by Music Unlimited]

Emily Olsen
Next

Episode 17: Imagining Space with Lois Rosson