Photographers tend to spend a lot of time with their subjects. For astrophotographer Rick Wayne of Madison, his subject for much of his life has been space. What started off as an interest in taking better pictures soon became something much greater, a sense of glory.
On one clear night, independent audio producer Alexandra Salmon joined Wayne to take photographs of the night sky at the Yanna Astronomical Research Station in Brooklyn, Wisconsin. They were surrounded by crickets, owls and a clearing in the trees with a perfect opening to the starry night.
(This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Rick Wayne: OK, so this here is a tracking mount. An equatorial mount. This was two checks from Grandma Lynn’s worth of money and maybe a little contribution from my wife, too. And I made this little 3D-printed gizmo so I could spread the tripod legs so it’s nice and firm.
I’m going to step over here and get the telescope out. And this guy, not to snow with you tech talk, but this is an 8-inch Ritchey-Chretién astrograph, which is to say a reflector.
A self-portrait of Madison, Wisconsin resident Rick Wayne, a software engineer by day and astrophotographer by night. (Courtesy of Rick Wayne)
Alexandra Salmon: So with the images you produce — is that what is actually out in space if we were to be in space?
RW: If you were out in space and looked at it, you would see nothing because these gases are a pretty good vacuum. But part of it also is because the camera is integrating. There are only a few photons hitting the sensor every second and your eyes can integrate only a quarter of a second at a time and the camera can do it for hours if I tell it to. For technical reasons, you wouldn’t do that.
Something like the Andromeda galaxy, which is just in an image with lots of integration time, it bursts with color and it’s just gobsmackingly gorgeous. In most telescopes, it looks like some fuzzy stuff and a couple of stars there. That’s what most of these deep space objects look like to the eye. It would be pretty much the same if you were out there in space, close up looking at them.
This part is a thermoelectrically cooled monochrome astrocamera, which means it’s just taking in photons. It doesn’t care what color they are. This in front of it is a filter wheel. If you look, you can see one of the filters there.
An image of West Veil Nebula in Narrowband and RGB Stars. (Rick Wayne/Red Wolf Astrophotography)
AS: Do you feel different things when you’re looking at a photograph of space versus when you’re looking up at space?
RW: Oh, yes.
If I’m looking at my own photographs, there’s that whole artisan pride and all that. But, just generally looking at astrophotographs, the images are so much more striking than looking up at the sky. They have color, contrast, shapes — but there’s something about seeing something with your own eyeballs, too.
When we do outreach and I set up the big scope — if Saturn is up — every person or every third person bends over and looks in the eye piece and they’re silent for half a second and then they say, “Oh, my god.” Because it’s just that little jewel floating in space. There’s something about that that no photograph can really convey.
The Milky Way captured at Newport Beach in Door County, Wisconsin. (Rick Wayne/Red Wolf Astrophotography)
AS: The images are so beautiful and I wonder if you ever feel like looking up at space does something for you that looking around here on Earth doesn’t?
RW: Oh, yeah. There’s stuff going on up there. You don’t get a sense of the forces at play of the universe and that really deep history. You can’t see that on Earth.
The old Carl Sagan saying that “We’re all stardust” … every atom in our bodies that’s higher up the periodic table than iron was built in a supernova explosion, or the Big Bang. That’s the only place those atoms come from.
And yet, here we are. We’re tiny, little insignificant specks of matter. That’s our whole world — built out of stuff that came out of supernova explosions.
AS: It’s wild!
RW: It is! And when looking up there, you get thoughts like that when you do it.
AS: When you spend so much time looking at space, does it ever make you feel so small?
RW: Oh, yeah. I mean, 70 million light years, come on. Oh, yes!
AS: How does that smallness make you feel? Sometimes it makes me feel a little insignificant. Not in a bad way, but it just does. I’m wondering how it makes you feel.
RW: Well, my self-regard is such that making me feel insignificant is a long haul up a steep hill. You got to work at that. Looking at the sky can do it.
But, it’s kind of comforting in a way. No matter how badly I screw up, I don’t matter. What I do on the other end of the spectrum may not matter, but it’s fun. It gives me pleasure. I’ve helped other people.
We only have a tiny piece of the universe but it kind of behooves us to make it ours, to do something with it. Whether it’s taking astrophotos, helping at a food bank, or just doing your job well, that ripples out.
Astrophotographer Rick Wayne captured this image of the Ring Nebula during his interview with producer Alexandra Salmon in Brooklyn, Wisconsin in 2024. (Rick Wayne/Red Wolf Astrophotography)
==
MUSIC: Hubble Image Sonifications by NASA
