Space Pr0n: The Stars, in Black and White

From SEED:

In the 1970s astronomer and photographer David Malin became the first person to photograph the faint colors of the night sky. His pictures taken from the Anglo-Australian Observatory have become the canonical images of many celestial sites, from the Horsehead Nebula to our nearest-neighbor galaxies. Now the architect of space color has published Ancient Light, a book of black-and-white prints that includes his shots of the surface of the moon, the Corona Australis nebula, and beyond.

Seed: You mention in the introduction to Ancient Light that astronomers were midwives at the birth of photography in some sense. What did you mean by that exactly?
DM: When the daguerreotype—the first photograph—was invented in the 1840s, it was Francois Arago, a famous French physicist and astronomer, who persuaded the French government to give its inventor a pension if he released the information about the daguerreotype to the world at large, which was a very unusual step in those days. And it was John Herschel, another famous astronomer, who invented the photographic fixer that really makes photography possible. There have been light-sensitive materials around since the time of Adam—literally, as apple skin is light-sensitive—but no way of fixing that image, making it permanent. John Herschel invented a way of doing that. Two astronomers were intimately involved with the beginnings, so it's quite appropriate that photography should have transformed astronomy once it got working really well.

Most B&W space images I have seen, admittedly, have come from various telescopes and were rather dull. But this slideshow has simply left me awestruck.