Starship Asterisk*

Has anyone compared or analyzed the differences between the old color film astronomical photos and modern CCD images, in terms of aesthetics?
For example, I remember how National Geographic made a big deal about a collection of showpiece photos from the Hale 200-inch back in the late '50s.
How do those images stack up against modern photos of the same subjects?

...Terry

twfeline wrote:Has anyone compared or analyzed the differences between the old color film astronomical photos and modern CCD images, in terms of aesthetics?
For example, I remember how National Geographic made a big deal about a collection of showpiece photos from the Hale 200-inch back in the late '50s.
How do those images stack up against modern photos of the same subjects?

Well, aesthetics is naturally a pretty subjective area!

My own opinion is that the very best film images ever made are substantially inferior to the work routinely produced these days by competent electronic imagers. The best film images were produced just before CCDs became the norm- work by Malin, for example, where he separately imaged objects through color filters onto B&W emulsions (very much as modern imagers do), and these images were spectacular. Yet, when I go back now an look at them, the results are very unimpressive.

Film is, for the most part, lower resolution than CCD, and has a resolution that varies widely with contrast within a single image. It is insensitive, requiring extremely long exposures which often introduced problems, and it has a large scale grain structure which is largely impossible to remove from an image. Color films vary widely in response, so most color film images show substantially different colors than we consider "normal" these days. Light scatters in the emulsion layer, creating odd halos around stars- an effect I find particularly unattractive.