The Astronomical Journey began in Paris in November 2014. On a photo fair my good friend Alex Novak introduced me to Joshua Chuang, Chief Currator of the Center for Creative Photography. Joshua was working on an exhibition about astrophotography and was looking for photos for his exhibition. One month later we met again in Brussels. The final choice of astrophotos and books from our collection was made. Joshua invited me to give the keynote lecture for the opening of the exhibition.It was clear that Joshua's photo selection wasn't a scientific or historical one but an intuitive one based on the aesthetic value of the photos and books. A completely different approach than the one of the conventional astrophotography exhibitions..
When couple of months later I saw the exhibition for real the approach taken was clear.
A surprising exhibition about astronomical photography. Not only astrophotography, but also a lot of surprising space exploration photos. The selection of images was merely based on some archives of the University of Arizona. The end result was a very professionally made exhibition.
For me it was clear that there must be a treasure of resources and archives about astronomy and astrophotography at the University. Discovering these treasures became one of my goals during my two weeks stay in Arizona besides my lecture.
Thanks to Joshua and his great team, who did the research and made the appointments, I was able to visit a lot of observatories and archives.
Everywhere I went, people took the time to guide me through the archives and observatories.
What I saw surpassed my expectations. For 25 years I've been collecting astrophotos and books and studying the history of the medium and still I discovered a lot of new and unexpected sources. The Department of Astronomy of the University of Arizona has an extremely rich tradition in astronomy and space exploration. Unfortunately a lot of the resources are scattered in different institutes. Woudn’t it be more interesting to concentrate the archives in one study center?
These web pages gives a chronological overview of my journey in Arizona and a part of California over a period of two weeks.
Scroll down and click on "View all" to read the blog and see all the photos.
