Out in deep space, our universe of heavenly bodies is a riot of glorious colors and fantastical shapes. But you won't know that by looking at the night sky, which, even in the clearest weather when it's dotted by seemingly endless stars, is a minimalist study in black and white. That's because the eye is unable to perceive colors when the source of light is small and faint.
One man has done much to show that objects in deep space have astonishing colors.
David Malin, the photographic scientist at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales. has been photographing celestial objects in the night sky for about 20 years through the observatory's telescope, one of the largest in the world. His photographs give a stunning view of stars, nebulae and distant galaxies that is virtually a compendium of art through the ages: from the somber chiaroscuro of Rembrandt and Caravaggio to the rich gold of Titian, from the Expressionism of van Gogh to the glowing hues of Turner, from the Post-Impressionism of Gauguin to the modernist target works of Jasper Johns.
For years Mr. Malin's photographs have been exhibited mostly at scientific institutions in shows like the current ''Night Skies: The Art of Deep Space,'' running through Aug. 31 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. But lately his photographs are also being shown as art. Last year they appeared at the Victorian Art Center in Melbourne. On Saturday, ''David Malin: View of the Universe'' opens at Howard Schickler Fine Art at 560 Broadway, near Prince Street, in SoHo.
In his achievements as an astronomical photographer, Mr. Malin stands alone. Not only is he known in scientific circles for his superb astronomical photography, but he has also invented new photographic processes to detect very faint distant objects, and in 1987 he discovered what Scientific American calls the largest galaxy known, Malin 1.
One of his inventions, photographic amplification, is a way of copying glass plates to increase the signal of the faint object against the natural glow of the night air. Mr. Malin used it in the early 1980's discovered a new kind of galaxy. Looking through existing glass plates taken by the observatory's companion Schmidt telescope, he isolated and amplified shells, or fossil remnants, around featureless elliptical galaxies. Scientists had believed that elliptical galaxies were formed when galaxies collided and coalesced, and Mr. Malin's discovery of the hitherto barely detectable shells confirmed this idea.
As it turned out, low-key, professorial Mr. Malin, with his remarkable eye for capturing nature's breathtaking artistry, and the Anglo-Australian Observatory are a good match. The observatory is on the eastern edge of the Australian outback, where the night sky is exceptionally dark, pollution free and where there is a 65 percent chance of clear weather. It was also broadminded enough to hire Mr. Malin, who was neither a professional photographer nor an astronomer, to start its photographic laboratory in 1975.
The photographic work he did as a chemist was the opposite of what he was to do half a world away. He used photomicrography to understand, for example, how pigments work in inks and paints and plastics and how adhesives work on surfaces.
Photography was something Mr. Malin had enjoyed since he was a teen-ager living north of Manchester. He was given a simple box camera by his grandparents when he was about 16, and he immediately did something prescient.
After 18 years with Ciba-Geigy, Mr. Malin wanted a change, and the Anglo-Australian Observatory provided more than a change of scenery. He has, he said, ''learned on the job,'' specializing in galaxies. In 1980 he became an Australian citizen.
Although the observatory is outside Siding Spring in New South Wales, the offices and laboratories are in Epping, a suburb of Sydney, and it is there that Mr. Malin spends most of his time. Telescope time at the observatory is rationed, and he considers himself lucky if he spends three to five nights there each year.
A recent British documentary about Mr. Malin, ''The Man Who Colors Stars,'' shows how he positions himself in the ''prime focus cage.'' He steps into a round cubicle that's open at one end, with the camera in the base and the telescope's primary 38-foot mirror beneath it. The cubicle is tilted by computer to nearly horizontal for access. On the curved sides, which are almost vertical when the telescope is in use, are glass-plate storage pockets, filters, intercom and other controls.
Custom-made 10-inch-square black-and-white glass plates are baked in an oven for a few hours in nitrogen gas, then given a dose of hydrogen to increase their sensitivity to very faint light.
Color film is not used for several reasons. With color film, contrast decreases as exposure time is increased to make faraway faint objects clearer. But color is important in astronomical photography because it contains information on the star's age, temperature, size and composition. It also says something about the physical state of the gas and dust from which stars are formed. Hot stars, like the sun, appear white. The coolest stars are a deep orange-yellow. Stars 10 times as hot as the sun are sky-blue.
Mr. Malin has found that the only way to record color faithfully and scientifically is to use a process discovered in the 1850's by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
First, he takes three exposures on three separate black-and-white plates, inserting a different filter in front of the plates to capture red, green or blue, the primary colors. With these negatives, each containing the red, green or blue information, he makes a positive contact copy. Then, in an enlarger, each positive is projected through a matching filter onto a sheet of color negative film, from which the final positive print is made.
His large exhibition prints are made commercially. But he is, he says, ''very particular'' about color balance. And the colors indeed vary greatly from image to image. ''Spiral Galaxy, M83'' might well be what our Milky Way galaxy looks like from a distance of 20 million light years or so. It is an elegant, incandescent swirl of light and dark, interspersed with bits of white and red.
By contrast, ''Orion Nebula, M42 and M43'' -- the star-forming region nearest us that can also be seen with the naked eye -- is theatrically hallucinatory: a faceless red blob of a head is above a spectral cape, inside which is a heart of bright light that changes into splotches of blood red.
Providing a kind of post-modern benediction to the two exhibitions is the gently luminous ''Sombrero Galaxy, M104.'' Suspended in inky darkness, this spiral galaxy resembles a glowing white sphere with a golden band made of little more than dust. At the heart of this galaxy is a black hole that could weigh as much as 10 million suns.
In the last two decades, Mr. Malin has made about 150 deep space images, mostly for scientific purposes. He estimates that about half have artistic merit, and in recent years he has had bad luck making more pictures. Sessions in 1995 and 1996 were failures because of bad weather. In 1994, Eastman Kodak, which had been supplying the special glass plates used by Mr. Malin, stopped production of those plates, and he has had to use much slower plates requiring longer exposure times. Electronic imaging, at least for the time being, is not on a par with the glass plates.