Four curiosities

Here are four slightly random images that I'm posting simply because they are slightly quirky, and I am rather fond of them.  The first is the Eskimo Nebula, an example of a rather particular type of nebula called a "planetary nebula".  The name is a misnomer: these objects have nothing to do with planets.  They are the remains of stars much like our sun, that die not with a bang but a whimper.  Instead of the fate of larger stars, which end as novae or supernovae, massive explosions and/or collapse into neutron stars or black holes, smaller stars like the sun simply puff their mass out into space as a series of cosmological death-rattles.  These puffs form a sphere of gas that expands outwards from the star over thousands of years.  They appear as small coloured discs - easily mistaken for planets.  Hence the name.  This particular nebula, the "Eskimo", NGC2392, is a rich blue colour not unlike Neptune.  It's the first example of its type I have photographed.

The next photo is f the Tarantula Nebula.  This is not strikingly exceptional as an emission and diffusion nebula - the (slightly colour enhanced) red elements are glowing hydrogen, while the blue/white sections are gas reflecting the bright light of internal stars.  The one really unusual aspect of this object is that it is outside our own galaxy, in the Large Magellanic Cloud.  It's actually a massive object, and if it were in our own galaxy - say, at the same distance as the Orion Nebula - it would take up half the sky and glow as bright as the moon.

The next is an image of a real neighbour.  This is Jupiter with her four brightest moons.  Actually this is a composite of two images - no single exposure can capture the detail of the bright planet as well as the faint moons, so I had to do a bit of Photoshop jiggery-pokery.

Finally, here is a fuzzy incomplete image of galaxy NGC1365 in Fornax.  For various reasons (clouds, trees, my own inexperience) I've only been able to collect 30 mins of total exposure time where it really needs about four times that much. The reason I'm posting it now is because last November a star in this galaxy (56 million light years away) went supernova.  It was quite bright last year, but is beginning to fade.  The star is still visible - it's the blue dot marked with the arrow.  The galaxy is starting to get too low in the Western sky to shoot properly - I'll image it again next year but by then the supernova will be gone.

A matter of perspective ...

This is my favourite astrophoto yet. I took it last week- 16 exposures for a total f 90 minutes. It is Centaurus A, a large, quite close galaxy that has its unusual shape owing to the fact that it is currently in the process of swallowing a smaller spiral galaxy.  At its heart is a supermassive black hole with a mass 100 million times that of the sun.  That sort of size puts things in perspective.

The other issue of perspective, and the reason I really like the photograph, is that you can easily see the foreground stars - the ones in our own galaxy.  The sense of distance is quite acute. 

I say it's a close galaxy, but I'm speaking cosmologically. It's around 13 million light years away, meaning the photons which hit the sensor of my DSLR left Centaurus A and began their long journey to earth at pretty much the same time as this chap, a Sivapithecus, came down out of the trees and on to the African grasslands, and began the complex process of trial and error that led to the tool-use and then ultimately to the invention of the DSLR ... 

The Jewel Box

As a child in the 1970s, I loved astronomy and space. It wasn't until I was 20, in 1986, that I was able to get a telescope. If you were alive then, and at all interested in what might rain down from above, ;-) you will remember that 1986 was all about Halley Comet fever. So in April 1986 I finally got a telescope - a modest 5" Newtonian - and with my reference materials (a newspaper article on Halley, a planisphere, and a Patrick Moore book on astronomy that I'd had for years) pointed my new treasure eagerly at where Halley was supposed to be.

Amazing! The eyepiece was filled with a glorious shperical burst of light. I couldn't believe what I was seeing:

 I looked harder at the image - interesting that the diffuse cometary halo semed to resolve into individual points of light ... And no sign of a tail, but then I had heard that this visit of Halley was disappointing. What I was seeing was anything but disappointing. But the longer I looked, the less it looked like what a comet was supposed to look like.

Well, eventually I realised that I was a few degrees off, and what I was looking at was Omega Centauri. Wonderful it was! I was looking for this comet, but was the sky really full of unexpected treasures? I started to slew the scope around (in those days, "slew" was something we did by hand) and came across something that literally took my breath away. There was a little pocket of gems in the sky that Aladdin had left behind. A sparkle of red, blue and green (I'm SURE I remmeber green!) stars in a tiny little treasure-chest just below the Southern Cross:

It was the Jewel Box, and it hooked my into the delights of the sky in a way that has lasted a lifetime.

So, nearly 30 years later, when I finally fulfilled a lifetime's ambition and acquired a new telescope and a camera, and after three months of technical bedding in during which I finally got autoguiding working, there was only one object I could possibly photograph. This little box of jewels.

Meade 10" SCT, F/10, with a Canon EOS 60Da. Next time I'll go for it with my focal recucer to F/6.7, which will enhance the sense of this little treasure of gems secretly buried in the deep south of the sky.

10x2' exposures, ISO 800.

Thanks for reading this far in the nostalgic musings of a lifetime star addict :-)

ANU School of Music: my part in its downfall

A lot of people have expressed some incredulity about my departure from ANU School of Music. That's sort of odd. I have never in my life argued in favour of the sort of dessicated School the place will inevitably become, and over the last three months become increasingly certain that it would not want me. I certainly did not want it.

I have taken a lot of flak this year because I chose not to hurl vitriol at the VC and his staff in public. I said at the time to whomever would listen that that would achieve nothing. Although it gives me little satisfaction, I was dead right about that. I thought I could do more to save what could be saved of a musical and performance culture by staying inside the tent. There, I was quite wrong.

But bizarrely, I copped most flak of all for my comments on air and in the Canberra Times in this article:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/anu-is-not-alone-as-music-schools-struggle-to-stay-relevant-20120618-20k32.html?skin=text-only

For instance, just last week, in her article mourning the talent lost from the School, Helen Musa wrote: "Powles is a different case altogether. As chair of the Education Committee, he was deeply involved in planning the new curriculum and in June he argued at length in “The Canberra Times” that changes were needed to make the school less elitist, saying that the issue was “one of relevance”. He is widely regarded (including my members of the ANU Choral Society, which he conducts) as the architect of the changes which have now seen him rejected."

It's hard to see how many errors she could have made in one paragraph ("The architect of the changes", by the way, is a direct quote from Geoffrey Lancaster in one of his uninformed sprays). At no stage in the article do I even *mention* the words elite or elitist. Indeed, if you read all the way to the end, you will see that I say that the modern musician needs to be "an expert practitioner" - as well as having to be an entrepreneur, teacher, facilitator, skilled in technology and a wide range of musical styles.

I stand by those comments. Tregear, and others, labelled my ideas "a TAFE curriculum, not a university one". Given that he's never taught at TAFE (nor held a permanent academic job at a university), I think he's deeply misinformed. Instead, he's doggedly replacing it with a curriculum formed out of the academic specialities of a bunch of certified musicologists. Good luck to him.

But for the record, Helen, far from being "the architect" I have NEVER supported the cuts, even while I understand why they have taken place; I have publicly rejected the "brutal" and "agonising" industrial process.

But most of all I reject the curriculum Tregear intends to teach. It is a dry, sterile, soulless affair, even *less* relevant to modern society than the one I critique in my article.

About a month ago I stopped to chat with Tor Frømyhr on the stairs at the School. I assured him that he'd be fine (I was wrong), as any manager who didn't hire him would have to be nuts (hmm ... jury is still out on that one). I also said (truly) that I didn't want to work at a music school that had no place for him.

Righto, I'm off to apply for some jobs. Maybe at some TAFEs. At least there will be music there.

A digital trobairitz: musical chivalry in the cyberspace age

This post is the abstract for my paper at the Annual Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia in December 2012

Recent tectonic shifts in the economics of music (and by extension, its political economy) have generated unprecedented challenges: for the music industries; for those concerned with defining and applying musical intellectual property; for the technologies of the production and distribution of music, both live and recorded;  and for the artists themselves.  It is hard to believe that it has only been a decade since Napster first made headlines as a threat to the hegemony of the CD-based recording industry.  Ten years on, not only is the music CD in the last yards of its journey towards obsolescence, it is more-or-less accepted that the battle to control (and sell) the intellectual property of recorded music as a commodity has been lost.  Social media are rapidly challenging mainstream media as the conduit for distributing, accessing, discussing, marketing and discovering music and musicians.  Recorded music is now, to all intents and purposes, free.

Photo by Brian Adams, http://baphotos.com.

Marian Call is an Alaskan singer-songwriter who is one of a cohort of emerging musicians building a career and a creative oeuvre within these new realities.  Classically trained and university educated  (she is a composition graduate from Stanford), she writes and performs songs that span genres from medieval, classical, jazz, folk/acoustic and many others.  She eschews contracts and labels - her audience base is entirely self-generated through social media and a frenetic touring schedule.  On tour she prefers house concerts to traditional venues – she will typically crowdsource venues via Twitter in advance of a tour, and rely on her supporters and followers on social media to publicize the event locally.  She is currently (Oct. ’12) touring Europe on this basis – a major logistic collaboration between Call and her supporters that she describes as “like a barn-raising”. Audiences at concerts are encouraged, but not required, to make a donation; similarly, her music is freely streamed online, and payment for the recordings are essentially a matter of honour.

Essentially, Call’s artistic and business practice diminishes or removes the notion of music as a commodity, an object of transaction. Instead, the emphasis is placed on relationships, or community – she has critiques the description of her as an indie or independent artist, suggesting that a better term is an “interdependent” artist.  In this paper I argue that this shift from music as commercial commodity to music as community catalyst has profound implications not just for the business  models of music, but for its aesthetics and semantics.  Call’s authorial voice within her music speaks and sings to and with her audience on a number of levels – literally, in the case of “Good Morning Moon” in which she sourced the chorus in the song as sound files individually submitted by her supporters.  Her music has an authenticity of expression and an imaginative range that, I argue, stems from its basis in a communicative premise that is, at root, ethical in nature – a code of musical chivalry that underpins the virtual and actual encounters on her journey as a modern-day trobairitz.