As the earth rotates the stars appear to move across the sky, as do the more obvious Sun and Moon This effect is easily recorded by leaving a camera outdoors with its shutter open during the night. To make this picture, the camera was pointed to the southwest, towards the dome of the AAT, from the UK Schmidt building on Siding Spring Mountain in New South Wales, and the exposure was about six hours.
If the camera had been pointed due west (right of the AAT dome), the stars which are on the celestial equator would have made straight trails as they slipped below the horizon, instead of the curves seen here. The lights which can be seen on the mountain are in reality quite faint and are only recorded in exposures which last several hours.
Credit: David Malin/Anglo-Australian Observatory
Post by David Malin From Earth to the Universe team.
This Saturday night we are participating in the global Flickr meetup Common Ground. The prints that you see in this post are going to be given away on the night through a quiz. These are beautiful, large, archival prints on a special paper that feature images from our photographic collections. So I thought you should be given a chance to look at and research these images so that you could perhaps win one of these prints.
Principal Curator Sandra McEwen will be available on the night to discuss these images with you should you have any questions prior to the quiz and she knows a lot about them. They will be displayed on one of the tables during the night so take a peek before we start the quiz. We will ask specific questions relating to these images but also to our work on Flickr. Good luck!
No known copyright restrictions.
This image taken in 1934 of a man and a woman on a ship comes from the Tom Lennon photographic archive . It appears that the man is carrying musical instruments and could be Eric J. Sheldon who was a dance band leader and editor of the monthly industry magazine, “The Australian Music Maker and Dance Band News”, 1932-36.
Lennon was the official photographer for the magazine.
Tom Lennon was a commercial and portrait photographer, operating his studio at 64 Victoria Road, Drummoyne, NSW during the 1930s and 1940s. His work covers balls and dinners held in Sydney, but also include weddings, funerals, work events, parties, portraits, pets, fashion, horse races, and various places and events in Sydney.
Photography by Tom Lennon
No known copyright restrictions
As a University of Sydney Museum Studies intern working on the David Mist archive for the past few weeks, I found this image very striking. England-born, Sydney-based photographer David Mist shot it in his studio at Studio Ten at 7 Nickson Street, Surry Hills in 1984. The advertisement was taken for French fashion designer Pierre Cardin. The image of two hands holding 3 pairs of sunglasses was created by taking a photograph of the model’s hands, then making a print and re-shooting this with a mirror underneath to create an evocative double reflection. Pierre Cardin was a regular account for Studio Ten and David took many photographs that would be used to advertise Cardin’s designs. David even travelled to Paris to shoot the Australian Pierre Cardin Collection – photographing everything from fur coats to watches!
Photography by David Mist
© All rights reserved
Post by Clare Plascow, Curatorial intern
This image features the Museum’s Van de Graaff generator being demonstrated at the recent ANSTO Open Day by Education Officer Bob Smith. It is an electrostatic generator, producing static electricity through friction. We use it in the newly developed Science Show, Zapped!, demonstrating to students how static and current electricity is made and how electricity is a form of energy, with various applications.
The charge is generated as the belt moves away from a plastic pulley. The charge then accumulates on the hollow metal sphere at the top of the stand. Students relate to the principle demonstrated, when discussion arises about how they can deliver electric shocks to one another in the classroom by rubbing their feet on the carpet and delivering this ‘charge’ via their finger or for even greater effect their metal ruler.
Some of the static charge from the metal sphere is transferred to the fibres at the top of it. The hairs rise and move away from each other because like-charges repel. The smaller sphere in Bob’s left hand is used to induce sparks or small lightning discharges which jump between the two spheres.
© All rights reserved
Photo and Post by Janson Hews, Education Manager
Last night on the forecourt of the Museum two projectors from theatres were rolled out on a trolley to do a test run for our upcoming Flickr community meetup Common Ground. Reproductions from historic images, originally glass plate negatives held in the Museums collection, were projected onto the archway at the front of the Museum. We were testing how the projectors would handle the large-scale projection and the images looked incredible at this size.
Common Ground is a Flickr community event that celebrates the Commons on Flickr . It is a ‘thank you’ to this community for making these photographic collections richer through comments, tags, location identification and citizen research. The slideshow will feature images from all of the institutions that participate in the Commons. So if you love photography then you are welcome to attend this meetup. Along with the projected slideshow we will be playing a great mix of music by 2ser’s Phantom Dancer. We have curator talks including Flickr members speaking and we have some special fine art prints to give away through a quiz. So come along on Saturday the 3rd October to the forecourt, don’t forget to bring a cushion to sit on and a picnic basket; we are looking forward to meeting you. The event starts at 6.30pm and runs until 9pm.
Photography by Paula Bray
Projections by Jonathon Fowler and Ben Rumble
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0
Katoomba railway platform, pictured here, opened in 1874. It was originally called The Crushers, and serviced the settlement around a quarry and rock crushing plant established in 1860. Kerosene shale and coal were also mined in the Blue Mountains, near Katoomba until 1933.
The settlement changed when the railway came. Trains brought holidaymakers, bushwalkers and visitors who could not get there any other way. The area blossomed into a tourist destination and health resort during World War 1. It remains to this day
Photography by Charles Kerry Studio
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Sandra McEwen, Principal Curator
Dust storms are not new in NSW, just fairly rare in this century and in Sydney. One of the Museums exhibitions Greening the Silver City seeds of bush regeneration deals with the problems of dusts storms and some solutions from over seventy years ago.
Fierce dust storms became regular events in Broken Hill from the 1890s. Here you can see a dust storm in 1907.
‘The sky turned red; fine particles of dust whipped against my face and body.’ Joyce Mews 1988, remembering the early dust storms. Schools closed and locals put wet rags under doors to stop the red soils from penetrating their houses. Those on the city outskirts faced harsh living conditions and regular battering from the westerly winds.
The dust storms combined with sand drift inspired one of the earliest green actions in Australia. In 1936 the Barrier Field Naturalists members enlisted the help of a mining company and through the process of native re vegetation, defeated the drifts of sand that were swallowing the outskirts of the famous mining town. Albert Morris, the Quaker who led this devoted band, was far ahead of his time.
This traveling exhibition is currently on display at Dubbo Library
Photo: courtesy Broken Hill City Library
Post by Malcolm McKernan, Designer and Anni Turnbull, Curator Design & Society
This is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. At its centre lies a superhot, dying star smothered in a blanket of dust and ice. A new Hubble image reveals fresh detail in the wings of this cosmic butterfly. Most planetary nebulae are distinctive, but few are as extreme as NGC 6302, also known as the Bug Nebula. The fiery, dying star at its centre is shrouded by a blanket of icy hailstones. Robert Frost’s 1920 poem “Fire and Ice” could have been written for this object:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Indeed a world did end here, when a Sun-like star reached the end of its days, ejecting its outer surface to become a planetary nebula, seen from a distance of about 40000 light years.
Photography Credit: ESA/NASA and Albert Zijlstra
Post by David Malin From Earth to the Universe team.
This image showing a drummer playing a unique looking drum kit from the 1930s comes from the Tom Lennon photographic archive. This image was taken on the 23 October 1935 at the Empress Ballroom in the Mark Foy’s building in the city that occupies the corners of Liverpool, Elizabeth and Castlereagh Streets in Sydney.
I am coming across more images of musicians in this collection that will be added to the Commons on Flickr over the coming weeks. Tom Lennon photographed many social scenes from the late 20s through to the 40s that included balls and dinners held in Sydney, weddings, funerals, work events, parties, portraits, pets, fashion, horse races, and various places and events in Sydney. Most of the balls that Lennon photographed were held at the Empress Ballroom in the Mark Foy’s building.
Check this great image from the State Library of NSW’s Sam Hood collection showing another fantastic drum kit from the 30s with the title ‘Dudley Cantrell Band, Grace Bros, Sydney, 1937’
Photography by Tom Lennon
No known copyright restrictions
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