My Physics class during senior year required us to do a project. Not just any project; not something defined by the teacher and assigned to be turned in in a week or two, It was to be a study designed by the student, conducted over the course of the school year, and handed in around the time of finals. I focused on Halley’s Comet, which was returning toward the Sun on its 75 to 79 year cycle.
I had recently learned that the night sky could be photographed with basic photographic equipment: a 35mm SLR, a normal (50mm) lens, and a tripod. Making these photos is kind of a balancing act. The goal is to capture as much light as possible from twinkling specks in the sky but not allowing their movement through the sky blur the specks. The main factors in gathering light onto film are film speed, lens aperture, and length of exposure. Film speed is limited by chemistry. At the time Kodak Tri-X 400ASA film, pushed two stops to 1600ASA, was the standard in low-light photography. Lens aperture is limited by lens mechanics and one’s budget. As lens aperture approaches the theoretical maximum for a given lens size the cost of the lens approaches painful exorbitance. With 1600ASA film even my affordable 50mm ƒ1.8 lens, with a long enough exposure, can photograph objects too faint for the naked eye to see. Here’s where we find the balance: a thirty second exposure was long enough to capture faint objects but short enough to minimize the effect of movement of the sky relative to the camera. In a thirty second exposure only the tiniest objects look like arcs tracing their curved path toward the horizon. The glare of brighter stars hides the arced path and they look like stars, though with a very slight oval shape. Two photographs taken this way a few nights apart show all the same stars in all the same places. Anything in a different position in the sky from night to night is a planet, whose movements are known and predicted well into the future, or something else, like a comet.
One night that Fall I stood out in a dark corner of farm country south of Spokane, taking 30-second photos of the night sky, hoping to find Halley’s Comet among the constellations. In the first print I made a few days later I found the comet, a small, fuzzy dot among the sharp points of the stars of Taurus. To my surprise and amazement, just above Taurus was a dazzling star cluster surrounded by wisps of nebula: the Pleiades. I was ecstatic. It felt like going out in the back yard to dig up earthworms and finding a Roman coin. Several nights of each month that year I went out to the darkest countryside I could find to take more photographs of the comet’s progress, and to capture other objects that I found in my reading; star clusters, nebulae, even a discernible galaxy.
Late in the school year we all presented our reports to the class and handed them in. Mine was a few pages of dot-matrix printed explanation and several 8×10″ black & white glossies of the night sky in acetate sheet protectors, with labels written on in felt marker. Everyone else’s presentations looked more scientific and more polished then mine. I felt a little amateurish but it didn’t matter: I had handed something in. I had had a lot of fun exploring the night sky in this way. Plus, my grades really didn’t matter any more since by that time I was already signed up in the Navy’s delayed entry program.
Months later, in the Summer while I waited to go to the Portland MEPS and be sent off to basic training, I received a small package and a note. My physics teacher, Larry Elsom, told me in the note that I, “had the best Comet Halley project submitted at LC and therefore have earned the Bushnell Comet Halley Quest Award”.