Babak Tafreshi, an Iranian-born artist and science journalist, leads an astrophotography workshop in the Maine wilderness and gives a talk related to the Bates exhibition “Starstruck” during October.

Science journalist Babak Tafreshi leads a wilderness photography workshop and offers a lecture related to the Bates College Museum of Art exhibition Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography during October.

Tafreshi leads the workshop in Maine’s Moosehead Lake Region Oct. 17-20 and offers an Oct. 22 lecture at Bates.

He is the founder of The World at Night, promoting world peace and environmental stewardship through an exhibition of photographs of the night sky over prominent earthbound landmarks.

Learn more about the astrophotography workshop.

The workshop takes place at West Branch Pond Camps, Maine’s oldest continuously operating sporting camp, located near the town of Kokadjo. Participants must provide their own transportation, but carpooling is encouraged and the museum will coordinate it.

Cost of the workshop is $500, including a nonrefundable reservation fee of $300. There is space for up to 15 participants. The trip takes place regardless of weather, offering artists the opportunity to photograph Maine’s wilderness, or just a chance to relax.

To register, please contact Anne Odom at aodom@bates.edu or 207-786-8212.

Titled The World at Night and exploring the importance of the night sky, Tafreshi’s lecture takes place two days after the workshop at 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 22, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. A reception in the art museum, also in the arts center, follows.

Weather permitting, a star-viewing party guided by local amateur astronomy clubs will follow the reception, offering visitors a firsthand look at celestial wonders. The public is welcome to all three of the evening’s events free of charge.

The Bates Museum of Art is open free to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, and Wednesday evenings September through May until 9. For directions and more information about events, please visit the art museum website.

“The eternally peaceful night sky looks the same above symbols of all nations and regions, attesting to the truly unified nature of Earth as a planet rather than an amalgam of human-designated territories,” remarks Tafreshi. He is one of 37 artists from around the world featured in “Starstruck,” one of the first exhibitions to treat astrophotography as an art form.

As a science journalist, Tafreshi has contributed to many television and radio programs on astronomy and has interviewed renowned astronomers and space scientists. He was editor of Iran’s astronomy magazine and is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope Magazine.

Tafreshi’s global contribution to night sky photography garnered him science’s most prestigious imaging honor, the Lennart Nilsson Award, in 2009. That same year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Astronomical Union designated TWAN as a Special Project of the International Year of Astronomy.

“Babak is an ideal person to draw together the threads of all the disciplines across the liberal arts,” says Anthony Shostak, the museum’s curator of education and the organizer of Starstruck.

“His long experience with journalism and his passion for photography make him a powerful communicator. And his photographs in Starstruck are among the most popular with visitors, perhaps because they ground the beauty of the stars with a human environment.”

Starstruck is perfectly suited for teachers in all levels of education to engage with art related to a variety of subjects including astronomy and physical science, history, geography, literature, religion and math. Group tours are welcome by appointment: please contact 207-786-8302.

“IC 5067″ by Ken Crawford. Archival inkjet print.

The Museum of Art presents lectures, star-viewing parties and other public programs throughout the autumn in conjunction with the remarkable exhibition Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography.

These events open with a lecture about light pollution of the night sky by a senior contributing editor for Sky & Telescope magazine at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 7, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center at Bates. A reception in the museum and a star-viewing party (weather permitting) follow. The museum is located in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

Media notes: Hear Douglas Vakoch’s Nov. 3 presentation about explaining human aesthetics to extraterrestrials, courtesy of Maine Public Broadcasting’s “Speaking in Maine.”

Watch Bill Green’s Nov. 10 WCSH-TV story about a Starstruck-sponsored astrophotography camp in the Maine woods.

“M42, The Great Nebula in Orion” (2005), by Robert Gendler. Inkjet print.

The public is welcome to the exhibition and related events free of charge. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and until 7 p.m. Wednesday evenings.

For more information or to order the Starstruck catalog, please call 207-786-6158 or visit the museum website.

Showing at Bates through Dec. 15, Starstruck is among the first major exhibitions to treat astrophotography as an art genre. The exhibition, organized by museum Curator of Education Anthony Shostak, features 106 images by 38 artists from around the world. Together with its attendant catalog, Starstruck presents new scholarship in this rapidly evolving field.

Presenting the Sept. 7 lecture is J. Kelly Beatty, an award-winning writer who specializes in planetary science and space exploration for Sky & Telescope and is on the faculty at the Clay Center Observatory in Brookline, Mass. Beatty chairs the New England Light Pollution Advisory Group and is on the board of directors for the International Dark-Sky Association.

More about Starstruck.

“For decades we’ve allowed the sprawl of civilization to steal ever more stars from our nighttime skies,” he says. “But this loss doesn’t have to be permanent. Light pollution can be reversed easily by common-sense approaches that not only restore the night sky’s beauty but also provide safe, energy-smart lighting solutions.”

A star viewing party. Photograph by Dennis di Cicco.

Following Beatty’s talk and the museum reception, the Central Maine Astronomical Society, Southern Maine Astronomers and the Bates Astronomy Club will hold a star party. Here visitors can experience firsthand views of deep-sky objects, planets, double stars and other wonders of the night sky, guided by amateur astronomers with years of experience and detailed knowledge of the sky.

Here’s a schedule of remaining museum events around Starstruck at Bates this fall:

• Wednesday events: Solar telescopic viewings at noon and gallery talks at 12:30 p.m., led by museum of art education staff and interns, begin Sept. 12.
• Oct. 6: Parents & Family Weekend lecture, reception and star party. Jeffrey Kenney ’80, a professor of astronomy at Yale University, offers a Cosmic Questions lecture on how to capture and interpret beautiful images of astronomical objects, and what they teach us. Lecture at 2:30 p.m. (Olin 104) and reception (museum) at 3:30 with a star-viewing party following (weather permitting).

“Bristlecone Pine and Milky Way, White Mountains, California” (2008), by Tony Rowell.
Lightjet print on Fuji Crystal Archive Gloss paper.

• Oct. 17-20: Astrophotography workshop with Babak Tafreshi. Travel to Maine’s 100-Mile Wilderness to image the stars from West Branch Pond Camps for four nights. For workshop details, please visit the museum website.
• Oct. 27: Homecoming Weekend lecture, reception and star party. Boston-based photographer Sharon Harper discusses her images in “Starstruck” and her forthcoming book. Lecture at 2:30 p.m. (Olin 104) and reception at 3:30 (museum) with a star-viewing party following (weather permitting).
• Nov. 3: Cosmic Questions lecture: Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute, explores how we might convey the aesthetics of humanity to extraterrestrials. 6 p.m. in Olin 104; refreshments in the museum follow. Co-sponsored by the departments of anthropology and rhetoric and the art museum.

Also planned, with dates to be announced, are artist talks and Cosmic Questions lectures by Jacqueline Woods, a West Coast-based Starstruck artist; Babak Tafreshi, founder of the website The World At Night and a Starstruck artist; and Alicia Soderberg ’00, an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard.

“Startrails,” a 2011 inkjet print by Yuichi Takasaka.

The headlining exhibition at the Bates College Museum of Art this summer, Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography is among the first major exhibitions examining astrophotography as an art genre.

Media note: Anthony Shostak, the organizer of Starstruck and the museum’s education coordinator, appears on the WCSH-TV news magazine “207″ to discuss the exhibition on Friday, Aug. 31. The program starts at 7 p.m. and airs on Channel 6 — don’t miss it!

Featuring 106 images by 35 artists from 11 countries across 5 continents, the exhibition opens with a reception and the lecture Drawing with Light by Weston Naef, a juror for the exhibition, at 3 p.m. Saturday, June 9. Starstruck runs through Dec. 15.

Starstruck events continue through fall 2012. Learn more.

The public is welcome to the exhibition and related events free of charge. The museum is located in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. For more information or to order the Starstruck catalog, please visit the museum’s exhibitions page.

The museum’s curator of education, Anthony Shostak, organized the exhibition, which, with its attendant catalog, will present new scholarship in the rapidly evolving field of astrophotography. Modern photographic technologies give artists immense freedom within the confines dictated by their celestial subjects.

An image from Alfred Stieglitz’s famous “Equivalent” series. Gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Alfred Stieglitz Collection.

“Their creations,” says Shostak, “are nothing less than overwhelming, depicting humbling, glorious delights that are often invisible to both the naked eye and even the telescope, and are revealed only through photographic means.”

Nine artists are included in Starstruck by invitation to them or institutions representing them: Michael Benson, Linda Connor, Robert Gendler, Sharon Harper, David Malin, Thomas Ruff, Hans-Christian Schink, Alfred Stieglitz and Jacqueline Woods.

The remaining artists were selected through a jury process. The distinguished jurors are Naef, curator emeritus of photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum; Dennis di Cicco, pioneer of CCD astrophotography and senior editor of Sky & Telescope Magazine; and Jerry T. Bonnell, co-editor and author of NASA’s Web feature, Astronomy Picture of the Day.

A 242-page color catalog will document the exhibition, illustrate each work in it and feature essays by the jurors and Eric Wollman, professor of physics at Bates.

The sun, the changing face of the moon and stars adrift on the night sky have inspired humankind since prehistoric times, driving our understanding of the universe and igniting countless creative imaginations. For millennia, a glimpse of stars in a dark sky has provoked a sense of wonder that has inspired cultural phenomena from ancient creation myths to current cinema.

The firmament’s splendor has also captured the eye of photographers from the earliest history of their medium. Today their creations are gaining attention. “Starstruck showcases the increasingly popular genre of astronomical imaging,” says Bonnell. “The photographs represent a cosmic confluence of scientific exploration and the artistic process.”

An archival inkjet print of the emission nebula IC5067 by Ken Crawford.

“When we began organizing Starstruck,” says Shostak, “we found no evidence of large exhibitions investigating this genre in the context of an art museum. During the intervening years, a small handful of exhibitions have touched upon astrophotography, but none with the scope of our project.”

“Starstruck is the perfect exhibition for an academic museum,” says Dan Mills, director of the Bates College Museum of Art. “Astronomy is a widely popular endeavor, linking people with the natural world and the quest to answer life’s ‘Big Questions.’

“At Bates, we investigate precisely those kinds of questions across the disciplines. Having an art exhibition serve as the nexus of that exploration is part of what makes us a different — and exciting — kind of museum.”

Starstruck will be accompanied by a wide variety of educational programs including lectures, workshops, guided star parties, concerts, theatrical performances and films.

It will also address environmental concerns. “Even as astrophotography enters a golden age of technological development and interest,” says Babak Tafreshi, artist and founder of The World at Night, “light pollution threatens to destroy humankind’s access to the starry sky.”

Acknowledging that the museum expects the exhibition to be extremely popular with a wide audience, Bonnell quips, “If you can’t find a good background for your laptop from this exhibition, you’re just not really trying.”

“Saturn,” a 2006 archival inkjet print by Damian Peach.