The Man Who Coloured the Cosmos
Once, all deep space photography was black-and-white. Then a chemist in Australia developed a new technique, and colour exploded from the heavens.
FEW PEOPLE have a building named after them, much less an asteroid, a planet or a star. But a whole galaxy? Filled with billions and billions of stars? That’s what happened to David Malin, one of Australia’s most celebrated astronomers and one the world’s foremost astronomical photographers. And it happened by accident.
In 1976, he was collecting new images for a book by fellow astronomers at the then spanking new Anglo-Australian Observatory in Siding Spring, near Coonabarabran, in outback New South Wales state.
“I started playing with these plates from the UK Schmidt Telescope in the darkroom,” he recalls. Trialling a technique he had only just invented — one that extracted more of the faint light from stars — he noticed something unusual: “A galaxy near the Virgo cluster had a funny thing sticking out of it. I didn’t know what it was, or even if it was meaningful.”
It looked like a jet sticking out of Messier 89, a well-known elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo. His fellow astronomers were surprised—the region had been well surveyed, so the object was…
