Astrophotography brings 'awe and wonder' to The Groove Artspace

Generations of painters have been drawn to New Mexico for the unique qualities of our light, but the darkness here is equally exquisite.

“We have less light pollution here than a lot of other places,” said Sarah McIntyre, who organized the exhibition, “Eyes in the Dark,” at The Groove Artspace. The juried exhibition, which runs through May 30, features nearly 70 images of the night sky by 29 astrophotographers.

“And we are very fortunate in the winter to most of the time have very clear skies. Winter is the best part of the year to do nighttime photography anyway, because we have a lot of hours of darkness,” McIntyre said.

New Mexico’s unique combination of dark skies and minimal cloud cover make it an astrophotographer’s paradise.

The Groove Artspace is a community art center, which, in addition to exhibiting local artists, offers art classes and low-cost studio spaces. Community building is a big part of The Groove’s mission, and “Eyes in the Dark” successfully brought together a community of astrophotographers, who, for the most part, had been unaware of each other’s existence. While a few of them had met previously through local stargazing clubs, most had been quietly pursuing their work in solitude.

“The majority did not know each other beforehand,” McIntyre said.

Some participants came to astrophotography from the science side and others from the artistic side. They also represent different specializations, with some focusing on wide-angle nightscapes and others on deep space photography, which requires a different set of equipment.

“I really wanted this to be a celebration of all the different kinds of astrophotography,” McIntyre said. “The deep space imagery, the wide-angle nightscapes, the star trails images, images of the aurora, solar eclipse images — all of these are amazing parts of our universe, and I thought it was worth celebrating all of it.”

McIntyre has been fascinated by the stars from a young age.

“I was one of those nerdy 10-year-olds, sitting in front of the magazine rack at Barnes and Noble with a copy of an astronomy magazine and a foldout star chart,” she said.

McIntyre has only been shooting nightscapes for the past “five or six years,” she said. “And it was just over a year ago that I started doing deep space imagery.”

Prior to that, she had been photographing historic adobe churches in rural New Mexico. As part of a Catholic family with deep roots in the state, tracing back nearly 600 years, McIntyre felt “awe and wonder” at seeing centuries-old churches bathed in “really ancient light coming from the stars.”

A few of McIntyre’s photographs appear to show a church glowing with a halo of stars and the Milky Way rising from its steeple.

Her images of the aurora borealis are just as otherworldly. She said she keeps track of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s geomagnetic storm reports to know when to look for auroras.

“If you see a G3 or G4 geomagnetic storm coming in and you’re in Albuquerque, you know you’re probably going to have a shot at seeing an aurora,” she said.

Some of the deep space photographs in the exhibition look like abstract paintings.

“A lot of Greg Marshall’s work has real psychedelic colors,” McIntyre said, referring to a fellow astrophotographer in the show who shoots mostly deep space images of nebulas. “He shot those in what’s called the SHO palette, which is typically referred to as the Hubble palette, but you achieve it with an SHO — sulfur, hydrogen, oxygen — filter set. You get a different kind of color palette depending on how you process them, and that gets really crazy really quick.”

The technical aspects of deep space photography can sometimes overwhelm novices, but McIntyre said she’s always happy to share her knowledge with anyone who’s interested.

“I take people out and teach them how to shoot wide-angle nightscapes and things like that. They usually find me through social media or here at The Groove,” she said.

“The real point at the end of the day is, you look up at the night sky, and it’s amazing. There is that sense of awe and wonder about the universe. That’s the most important thing about this by far,” McIntyre said. “It’s not the shutter speeds. It’s not the ISO (the camera’s sensitivity to light). It’s not the hours of grueling processing of deep space images. It’s just a way to be thoroughly engrossed with the universe and to be amazed by everything that’s out there.”

Despite the growing popularity of astrophotography in New Mexico, there have been few exhibitions dedicated to the practice. McIntyre said “Eyes in the Dark” is the first major group exhibition of astrophotography in Albuquerque in recent memory.

“So, this is a really important way of sharing our wonder and awe about the universe with everybody else who’s around,” she said.

Astrophotography brings 'awe and wonder' to The Groove Artspace