Saturday, April 21, 2012

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.

5.19-17

Eyes on the Skies, Chapter 2

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!

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