Just published! Well, three years ago.

I recently learned that my 2001 photograph of the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory was published as a full-page chapter heading in the 2009 educational book Eyes on the Skies: 400 Years of Telescopic Discovery by Govert Schilling and Lars Lindberg Christensen.

The photograph was taken at sunset on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 slide film with my Canonet QL17 GIII. Given that the book used a vertical crop from the horizontal frame, I’m quite satisfied with the quality of the image in print.

The reader may wonder how I just came to realize that my photograph was published three years ago.

Several years ago, I licensed this photograph under GFDL and Creative Commons-Attribution licenses, so that I could use it in Wikipedia articles about Palomar. In 2008, with the International Year of Astronomy approaching in 2009, I was contacted by the production team for the above book, asking permission to use the photograph in the book and associated video. I agreed, and provided a high-resolution file.

Unfortunately, I had already heard about a different project celebrating the same anniversary: 400 Years of the Telescope on PBS. I mistakenly concluded that this was the project that they were contacting me about. When the 400 Years book and video came out, I looked for my photograph, didn’t see it, and simply assumed that they changed their mind and didn’t use it.

Recently I was playing with TinEye, and found my photograph on the Eyes on the Skies website. That’s when I realized there was an entirely separate book with my photograph in it, and I bought a copy. Good thing it’s still in print!