Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
Something spurred a recollection.
Back when I was in high school one of my gaming buddies was the step-son of a professor of computer science at Sydney Uni. One of his (the professor's) areas of interest was in getting better data on the things that people were looking at when they saw what they reported as UFOs. To that end he devised a cheap UFO observing kit that people might carry in their glove boxes and in their packs while hiking. I recall that one of the components that he showed my was a card with a strip of numbered windows in it, each containing a photographic filter. The idea was that some person with no special knowledge or skills observing a luminous phenomenon should take a series of snapshots through each of the filters in succession, so that photos might be taken that would reveal something to experts.
I don't remember what all the filters were. There were a few narrow-pass astronomical filters that would have revealed ionised oxygen and a few other things. There were two plane-polarising filters at different angles. There was a circular-polarising filter that might have revealed light produced under some condition of intense magnetising (that had been difficult to source). And there was a diffraction grating.
Perhaps if I didn't know what phenomenon was going to be observed, by whom, where, or when I might issue something of the sort. Perhaps I'd chuck in a colloidal-silver filter or something else mystical-sounding.
|
Good idea.
In our futuristic modern times, there exist graduate degrees in things like scientific photography. Would that exist in the 1990s?
Back in the benighted ancient past of 1995 (meaning that the education of an established professional could date back all the way to the 80s or even further), what kind of education and background should a specialist in taking photographs with scientific and evidentiary value have?