“Startrails,” a 2011 inkjet print by Yuichi Takasaka, is one of the astrophotographs on display in the Museum of Art exhibition “Starstruck” through Dec. 15.

With a couple of weeks still left for the Bates College Museum of Art exhibition Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography, Maine Sunday Telegram art critic Daniel Kany urged his readers not to miss it.

“Whether you go for photography, art, science or spirituality, Starstruck is one of the most moving and intriguing exhibitions to alight here in, well, eons,” Kany wrote in a Dec. 2 review of the long-running show.

“If you don’t know about astrophysics, you have all the more reason to go. All you have to do is look.”

Organized by museum Education Curator Anthony Shostak, Starstruck was one of the first major exhibitions to treat astrophotography — the practice of photographing stars, planets, nebulae and other celestial presences — as an art form, in addition to its scientific value. Kany’s review was the latest in a strong of prominent and highly favorable reviews of the show, including spots on the local NBC affiliate, WCSH-TV, on Aug. 30 and Nov. 2.

Kany’s review also looked at a thematically related show at Portland’s Space Gallery put together by Liz Sheehan, formerly of the Bates museum.

• Read Daniel Kany’s review in the Dec. 2 Maine Sunday Telegram.

The Momenta Quartet.

Presented by the Olin Arts Alive  music series and the Bates College Museum of Art, the renowned Momenta Quartet performs new music by two Bates composers at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 4, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission is $12 and tickets are available at batestickets.com. Free tickets are available to the first 100 seniors and students; please reserve by calling 207-786-6163. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

The Momenta program includes the premieres of music by Bates composers Hiroya Miura and William Matthews, as well as music by Debussy, Haydn and Jason Kao Hwang.

The quartet will also offer a critique of music by Bates student composers at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 5, in Olin Concert Hall. This workshop is free and open to the public.

Praised by The New York Times for its “focused, fluid performance” and by contemporary music website Sequenza 21 for its “fire, fantasy and absolute musical commitment,” the Momenta Quartet has premiered more than 50 works in the past seven years and has collaborated with more than 80 composers.

Based in New York City, the quartet performs nationally and internationally. The quartet’s repertoire ranges widely from the classics to contemporary. The members of Momenta are violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Adda Kridler, violist Stephanie Griffin and cellist Michael Haas.

Inspired by the current Bates College Museum of Art astrophotography exhibition Starstruck, Miura’s “Singularity” adapts cosmic radiation readings to serve as the harmonic basis for his piece.

The imagery in “Mare Tranquillitas,” a musical and video piece composed by Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music at Bates, incorporates astrophotographs from Starstruck and photographs of Momenta’s instruments.

The Momenta Quartet.

Three concerts at Bates feature choral music for the holiday season, and compositions by Bates faculty played by a visiting string quartet.

The Bates College Choir performs a holiday program including Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols” at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 30 and Dec. 1.

Presented by the Olin Arts Alive music series and the Bates College Museum of Art, the renowned Momenta Quartet performs new music by two Bates composers at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 4.

Both concerts take place in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission to the choir concerts is free, but tickets are required. Admission to the Momenta Quartet event is $12 and tickets are available at batestickets.com. Free tickets are available to the first 100 seniors and students; please reserve by calling 207-786-6163. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

Bates College Choir

Directed by John Corrie, the choir presents a program featuring Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols” and Eric Whitacre’s “Five Hebrew Love Songs.”

John Corrie conducts the Bates College Choir.

An internationally esteemed 20th-century English composer, Britten composed operas, orchestral music, vocal and choral works, and chamber music. Scored for three-part chorus, solo voices and harp, “Ceremony of Carols” marked Britten’s return from America to wartime England in 1942.

Each of Whitacre’s five songs captures a moment that he and his wife, soprano Hila Plitmann, shared, and which she rendered as poems that he set to music.

Momenta Quartet

The Momenta program includes the premiere of Bates composers Miura and William Matthews, as well as music by Debussy, Kee Yong Chong and Jason Kao Hwang.

Praised by The New York Times for its “focused, fluid performance” and by contemporary music website Sequenza 21 for its “fire, fantasy and absolute musical commitment,” the Momenta Quartet has premiered more than 50 works in the past seven years and has collaborated with more than 80 composers.

Based in New York City, the quartet performs nationally and internationally. The quartet’s repertoire ranges widely from the classics to contemporary. The members of Momenta are violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Adda Kridler, violist Stephanie Griffin and cellist Michael Haas.

Inspired by the current Bates College Museum of Art astrophotography exhibition Starstruck, Miura’s “Singularity” adapts cosmic radiation readings to serve as the harmonic basis for his piece.

The imagery in “Mare Tranquillitas,” a musical and video piece composed by William Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music at Bates, incorporates astrophotographs from “Starstruck” and photographs of Momenta’s instruments.

The Momenta Quartet will also offer a critique of music by Bates student composers at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 5, in Olin Concert Hall. This workshop is free and open to the public.

Poster design by Khi Kim ’16.

An enveloping multimedia stage experience explores the mental state of an alien abductee as Bates presents the play 1000 Airplanes on the Roof  in 7:30 p.m. performances Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 25-27, in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.

The performances are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-8294.

Bates senior Thomas Holmberg of Winnetka, Ill., is the sole performer in this play whose text was written by David Henry Hwang as part of a 1988 collaboration with composer Philip Glass and visual artist Jerome Sirlin. The director of the Bates production, Senior Lecturer in Theater Katalin Vecsey, is using music by faculty composer William Matthews in place of Glass’ score, and images from the current Bates College Museum of Art exhibition Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography.

“The only thing that is actually coming from the original production is the script,” Vecsey says.

The hourlong play depicts a Kafkaesque character, M, once an untiringly rational person who now has trouble sorting out reality from imagination. In a confused and terrified soliloquy, M explains that he has been recurrently abducted by extraterrestrials, transported to a spaceship hovering above the Earth, and subjected to painful and bizarre experiments.

The Bates production is an innovative collaboration among the departments of music, of theater and dance, and the art museum. “We are trying to transform Schaeffer so it doesn’t feel like a theater when you walk in. It’s going to be a very nontraditional theater production,” says Vecsey.

As Holmberg says, “You walk in, and it’s outer space.”

Manipulated images, distorted vocal treatments and other sound effects, and Matthew’s electronic music will play throughout the production, even greeting the audience as they enter the theater. To visually represent M’s experience of alternate realities, Vecsey selected the astrophotographic images that will be projected in Schaeffer during the performance.

Anthony Shostak, the museum’s education curator, organized Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography. As Vecsey explains, “Anthony approached me about Starstruck more than a year ago. We were looking to find a way to incorporate students into the exhibition in several departments.”

Bill Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music at Bates, composed the music thinking to create a sonic environment that’s “eerie, spooky, otherworldly.” The score is for exclusively electronic sounds. Glass’ music “has a very particular sound and is loud, and I think Kati wanted something different,” he says.

Originally planned as a small production in the Olin Arts Center, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof was moved to Schaeffer as part of events surrounding the Oct. 26 inauguration of Bates President Clayton Spencer, as well as Homecoming Weekend.

A question-and-answer period will follow each performance, including Stephanie Kelley-Romano, an associate professor of rhetoric who is an authority in the rhetoric of alien abduction.

“Whether the audience should accept M’s story or write him off as psychotic is for the audience to decide,” says Vecsey. “I don’t want to influence the audience. They can decide for themselves what to believe when they leave the theater and think about it.”

A history major, Holmberg is performing this piece as part of an independent study class in theater.

The original 1000 Airplanes on the Roof premiered in an aircraft hangar in Austria, conducted by Michael Riesman and featuring vocals by Linda Ronstadt.

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.

Jacqueline Woods, “Black Sun No. 30,” 2012.

Up next in a series of talks connected with the Bates College Museum of Art exhibition Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography are presentations by a professor of astronomy from Yale and by an artist showing work in the show.

At 2:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 6, astronomy professor Jeffrey Kenney gives the talk Imaging the Universe, addressing how we interpret beautiful images of astronomical objects and how such images are taken.

California artist Jacqueline Woods discusses her work in an talk titled Discovering the Black Sun at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11.

Both events take place in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. A reception in the museum, also located in the arts center, follows each presentation. The events are free and the public is welcome.

The Bates College Museum of Art is open free to the public Mondays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Wednesday evenings through May until 9 p.m. For directions and more information, please visit bates.edu/museum/ or call 207-786-6158.

Yale astronomer Jeffrey Kenney ’80.

A member of the Bates class of 1980, Kenney will offer a lavishly illustrated presentation that will also explore what different colors in astral imaging mean to scientists and what images teach us about the nature of things in the universe. He’ll present remarkable images of evolved and exploding stars, star-forming nebulae, and interacting galaxies and clusters.

“Because Starstruck showcases images taken at the confluence of art and science, each image has something to teach us about our universe,” says exhibition organizer Anthony Shostak, the museum’s curator of education.

“Whether it’s judging the age of a star based on its color or discerning the elements in a colorful image of a nebula, Jeff is an ideal person to give us some insight into some of what the art has to offer.”

Woods is one of nine artists invited to participate in Starstruck whose work forms a core around which the juried portion of the exhibition was built. Her cameraless photographs in the show were inspired by celestial phenomena such as eclipses, and are a response to historic photographs by Ansel Adams and Minor White.

Teachers in all levels of education find Starstruck is a perfect vehicle to explore a variety of subjects outside the classroom, including astronomy and physical science, history, geography, literature, religion, and math. Group tours are welcome by appointment: 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.