American cinematographer (Feb-Dec 1929)

Twenty-four American C i n e m a t o g r a p h e r August, 192<> 'Photographic o^stronomy An Unusual Paper On An Interesting Topic — Presented at the Spring Meeting of the S. M. P. E., New York City, May 6-9, 1929 By Leslie E. Cuffe N PRESENTING this paper I wish you all to thoroughly understand that I am not an Astronomer, in fact I have never given it much thought until a Mr. Charles F. McManus came to me with several pages of data he had secured and worked into a very technical way dealing with Astronomy and asked me to read it over and let him know if there was any possible picture material in it. I searted to read but before very long I found myself millionsof miles away from this little earth of ours and very little chance of getting closer as I read further. This struck me as being a great thing. Imagine in a few feet of film being able to take an audience out into space through great planets, star clouds, great gaseous regions, and into universes so great that this little earth and Sun and a few planets we see and feel about us become insignificant as compared to these enormous universes. With this thought in view I took all this material and grouped into it what I thought would make four very interesting pictures, building around each group sufficient story and travel to make them also interesting to the untechnical mind. The first picture I titled "Mt. Wilson" and dealt more or less with the different telescopes, their differences in magnification as compared on a given star and a few random shots of the heavens showing the great globular clusters and cepheids, some of the most remote objects of the entire heavens. In the second picture, which is titled "Our Solar System." I dealt entirely with our Sun and its eight planets all of which are in close proximity to our earth. However, these planets of ours, due to their closeness and the great distance we (our Solar system) are from the rest of the universes, do not make very spectacular shots due to the fact that when the telescope of such great magnitude is focused on such a close object to objects in the regions behind and beyond these plaanets are so remote that the plain of focus does not pick them up. The third picture I titled "Our Universe" and deals entirely with the closer nebulous clusters of Star Clouds that comprise "Our Universe" and are not as remote as the objects in the great Galaxy. In the fourth and last grouping which is titled "The Galactic System" we take you out into Universes millions of light years from this earth of ours and bring you close to these enormous Universes whose light alone traveling at the tremendous speed of six trillion miles per year has taken over a million years to reach this small earth of ours. This we have captured and photographed, and brought to the screen one of the most increditable sights the human eye has ever or probably ever will witness. I am now going to try and explain some of the difficulties we encountered and overcame in the making of these pictures. There are many obstacles which present themselves that heretofore have not been encountered in the photographing of motion pictures. For example, when our camera was placed in the telescope and the telescope focused on a given object we immediately encountered on time exposure eight motions that had to be corrected; for, in the relation of our camera Leslie E. Cuff View of a spiral nebula throwing off material which condenses to form new worlds and the object being photographed, that is, the earth is constantly revolving on its axis and traveling along its orbit, while its poles are constantly tipping and revolving in the fashion of a top that is losing its speed and starting to slow down. At the same time the Sun is traveling through its orbit, and the object we are photographing is revolving and going through space on its orbit. Therefore, when all these motions are taken into consideration there is a constant changing and displacement of this earth in relation to any object in the Heavens which we may be photographing. To offset all these motions that are encountered in relation to this earth and the various objects in the heavens, these enormous telescopes are all controlled electrically and by clockwork so that over any given period of time the same position can be maintained of any object in the heavens after the telescope is once set by the professor who calculates it mathematically. The next difficulty we ran into was the exposure necessary for the different planets. Nebulae, Star Clouds, and Universes we had to photograph. Each object had to be tested individually before actual shooting of the camera to determine the time exposure necessary per fram of motion picture film. This alone took considerable time when we take into consideration that our photographing time exposure per frame on the Nebulous Clusters, Illuminous Gasses, Dependant and independant groups of Suns and their surrounding worlds existing several thousands of light years in the central part of the Galactic System took exposures from three hours and fifteen minutes to four hours per frame. Or, we might say the average exposure was three and a half hours per frame. The Sun we photographed at normal exposure. The moon which we photographed when full to get the maximum light volume took 1 7 minutes exposure per frame. The planets surrounding our Sun varied directly in relation to their distance and the color of light being given off from them ; for instance, Mars which has a red glow and photographs fairly fast as compared to Uranus which has a pale green glow. Mercury is one of the hardest of our planets to photograph, due to the fact that it lies in a path between us (the Earth) and the Sun, and the light from the Sun can only be overcome at certain seasons and times. The other planets, except Neptune which has a pale blue glow, photograph fairly fast. However this color value of Neptune is offset by the tremendous distance it is from the Earth. It was necessary to use the Hydrogen filter in all our photographing, as we found this was the only filter that would photograph through the gasses, atmosphere and water vapor which surrounded a lot of the objects we were photographing. Our process of photographing the heavens which we have recorded and incidentally are the only authentic records on motion picture film of these different bodies, took over a period of fourteen months, working every night through the different telescopes on Mt. Wilson, California, and was made possible only by the fine cooperation that was given us by the Carnegie Institute of Washington, D. C and the untiring efforts of Dr. Adams, Professor Joy, and Professor Ellerman, of the Mt. Wilson Observatory staff.