Capturing the Cosmos

An Exclusive Interview with Astrophotographer Extraordinaire Michael Goh

By Lexie Wallace

LW: Who is Astrophotobear?

MG: There have been times where Astrophotobear has more of a social profile than I do. Everyone knows Astrophotobear - but not Michael Goh. Originally the bear was a presence – a pseudonym - to be avoid an online presence while I was a bank manager.

LW: Did you use a different online handle before @astrophotobear?

Peering into the cosmos through his camera lens, Astrophotographer Michael Goh unveils the enchanting beauty of the night sky in an exclusive interview with our new STEM Outreach Officer Lexie Wallace.

MG: Yes, I had Erax, and I have had that since year 6. Erax used to be a comic character I created. I used to draw comics and sell them. Well, I started selling them as soon as I got to high school, but I was creating characters from year 6 and onwards.

Erax was basically...how that came about was...I could not come up with a name, and I was going through Encyclopedia Britannica, and came up with Erax -- the name of the assassin fly.

The character itself was not an assassin fly, but the character was an assassin. That was part of a comic serial I made. I created two volumes of it, and the comic was called Mottob - which is bottom backwards - because of course, when you are young you think, what names can you come up with? I have still got the comics somewhere.

My youngest daughter keeps on asking me to draw characters from there...She is a much better artist than I am. Both of my daughters are very good artists.

LW: Did you draw your comics from photographs, or from imagination?

MG: This was all from my own imagination. In Primary School I was in the advanced class for artists, and you got to do all sorts of extended artwork, like your Indian inks, and some leatherwork. So, I did a lot more of that sort of thing.

Going back a lot further, my mum used to be a teacher before she was a lawyer. She was a teacher when she was in Malaysia, and she’s also an artist. She’s got sculptures that she has done, and she still does a lot of painting now. She’s into a lot of Chinese painting and inks.

LW: Did she have a plan for you growing up?

MG: Law.

LW: Did you think you would become a lawyer growing up?

MG: Well, being Chinese it was, you’re going to be in business, aren’t you? So, my older brother and I both went to business school. I was just floating around, and I suppose that’s the problem with the generation of 40 - 50 plus years or so ago. You could be anything you wanted. I think people ended up with an identity crisis. People thinking, I just don’t know who I am - or what I want to do to contribute.

LW: Did you have an identity crisis?

MG: Well, the thing is that, in high school, I got the top score for accounting and law, and then just naturally went into business...and then just went into working in a bank, and then so many years later you start thinking about, well, what else?

But then at University, I met my wife. And it was quite funny because she was completely off in a different direction as well. She was a social work studentand I was a business school student - and you can’t get much further away from each other.

LW: Describe Yourself in three words.

MG: Tired.

Comes with being self-employed. I work a lot longer now, so I need to spend the time to be available and supportive to everyone that matters to me.

Experimental.

Trying different things. I’ve got a new idea, or a client has a new idea - I do a lot of experiments while things are working in the background while I’m still working as well. So, I might have one of the telescope mounts or sliders working away in the background while I’m working on something else as well.

Purposeful.

Even when I’m accepting jobs - I thinkhow does this contribute to why I’m doing everything?

No one says I wish I would have worked more. It’s, how do you live with purpose?

How do you want to have lived?

LW: What’s the first memory that comes to mind when you think of April 20, 2023?

MG: We have a 360° video where you can see us all running around about a minute before totality.

It’s hilarious because not only did we have a huge amount of sunscreen on us, but I’ve quite literally got a thumbprint on the centre of the video, right where the sun is. You clean everything off, but of course it’s greasy and so on...So sunscreen doesn’t work very well.

When I think about the eclipse, I remember it as ...I suppose seeing it at totality with the corona around it. and, for some reason...I know I didn’t imagine it because ultimately everyone else I’ve talked to saw it as well, you can see the pink around it as well. Not sure if it’s something to do with the prominences around the sun. It doesn’t look like a lot of photos that you see of an eclipse.

So therefore, when processing it and so on... it was extremely surreal.

I also think of a friend of mine who flew over from Norway, she forgot to remove her solar filter as well. Looking at all the information about how to do the eclipse and so on, when it gets to time to remove the solar filter, usually someone will say, Remove the solar filter! but of course, we were the most experienced people where we ended up going, so no one else was shouting it out.

LW: Did you get a chance to really appreciate the eclipse?

MG: I was more focused on my equipment than I should have because I was running behind schedule. Since the eclipse is only a minute long, one of the main things I thought was important was having pre-sets so you can just literally just turn one knob, instead of having to fiddle around with dials and so on... which itself can take ten seconds or so. For one of the cameras, I had set up, I had not done the pre-sets.

It’s my fault also for having a lot of fun doing the outreach side of things. I had a lot of people coming along seeing what I was photographing. Since I had the footage zoomed in a little bit, almost the entire screen was filled up with the sun. You could see the eclipse coming across, the sunspots that were there, and when it hit totality and so on.

Even with saying that pre-sets were one of the most important things to do with the cameras, I even had two intervalometers attached to the cameras, which were attached to the telescope, so I could quite literally just unplug one intervalometer and plug in another intervalometer without spending time to change what the interval was. So, I went from one shot every second - to one shot every five seconds - for a different phase of how I was doing an eclipse.

LW: Where did you set up?

MG: I originally got to the main viewing site before 7, and I was wandering around trying to work out where to set up. I lost close to two hours. I wasn’t technically in the science area, where Matt Woods from the Perth Observatory, the Gravity Discovery Centre, and a few other places were as well. I wasn’t technically in the media area as well, even though I was technically doing it for the media. And it was a few hundred meters from where I parked the car. And I thought, well I’ve quite literally got 20-30 kg worth of gear…and I need to plug myself into power as well, so I thought, well, that’s just not going to work.

So, I drove 500 metres to 1 kilometre away and set up down on a dirt road somewhere. A few of my friends who came over from Norway and Germany turned up to the main site, and said, oh we’re here now -- where are you? And I said, I’ve left. And they quite literally walked to catch up with me.

LW: Your photograph of the eclipse made it to the front page of the West Australian – what were your first thoughts when you saw your image on the front page?

MG: Well, it’s funny, I didn’t see it for a while! I had to ask my eldest daughter to get a couple of the newspapers.

LW: How did your photo make it to the front page?

MG: I have a relationship with ICRAR, and they asked me to send a timelapse through on the day. So originally, I said 3 pm in the afternoon, but I did the timelapse and uploaded it by 12:30 pm when the eclipse was still happening. Because I was shooting tethered, all I did was unplug the camera process what was on there. So, I uploaded the video footage then.

And then, when I was trying to eat some food, I got a message from ICRAR saying by the way, do you have any photos that look like this? And the photo they showed me was orange. But the eclipse wasn’t orange ...it was white. So, I sent them two photos, and all I did was increase the colour temperature on one.

It was quite literally not much in terms of editing.

LW: Where else did your photo appear?

MG: Apparently, there’s some images of mine from the eclipse that went viral - but sometimes you can’t be sure if it is your photo or not, since you literally have thousands of people photographing the solar eclipse. I know that my image went to multiple television stations here, but it may have also gone to the BBC, because I got a message about that, but I really don’t know. I thought - I’m in the middle of nowhere now - I don’t know what’s going on.

LW: What technical details were behind the image on the front page?

MG: The West Australian image was taken with a Canon 6d on an ED80, using a HDQ5 for the mount. I didn’t use a hydrogen alpha filter.

LW: Are you an eclipse chaser now?

MG: I don’t go outside of Australia much. I want to do more - especially things like a five-minute totality. I am already preparing for the next solar eclipse - the one that goes across the Kimberley in 2028. Hopefully I will be around the Bungle Bungles area, but they said it was going across Uluru, so I am still just trying to work out where to do things.

I’m also working out how to improve things. I’d probably end up having more cameras around - I know I had a crapload around the first time around, but because I had to relocate, I basically was running a little bit behind in my schedule. I had certain intentions, I had quite literally written down intentionally, almost to the second, exactly how things would work out.

LW: Why is astrophotography important to you?

MG: As far as my career has gone as a photographer, I try to share the reason why I do things -- as opposed to just making pretty pictures. What is the actual benefit for doing this?

The astrophotography has a positive benefit towards your interest in STEM, towards your arts, towards your mental health - not just my mental health, tourism in the regions, creativity, understanding of aboriginal culture… there’s so many boxes that it ticks, basically. It’s not just about having a pretty photo. But the pretty photo contributes to the creative side of things.

And the environmental aspects of things as well. Not only the light pollution -- but also the other environmental impacts.

LW: Are you involved in any work about light pollution?

MG: Well, yes and no.

The documentary that’s on now about the Square Kilometre Array has a lot of things that’s angled towards light pollution. We were looking at doing a documentary with Astrotourism WA, since they have a very large focus on light pollution as well. But I’m working on formulating effectively a documentary myself on light pollution anyway.

There are other documentaries and things that are being done about light pollution, but in terms of promoting our night sky conversation, there’s nothing stopping us from saying, - let’s just get something done to create something that highlights the issues of how fantastic the night sky is, and why it needs to be preserved, and the effects of light pollution itself.

Unless people learn about more it, they won’t really care. A part of this is also working on virtual reality as well.

I effectively have people interested in what I do, but it’s just if you can tell the write stories with it. Everything is about storytelling when you’re placing it to various places, so it’s about how do you want to portray something, you don’t want it to purely be about pretty images, and so on. It’s about asking: what is the actual benefit of doing this?

LW: If you were to capture your personality in a single photograph, what would it be?

MG: It would be me sleeping on the back of a truck.

LW: What advice would you give to aspiring photographers who are just starting their journey?

MG: Well, I always think it’s funny, I run workshops, and one of the first things I say is: Don’t listen to anything I’m talking about. Because, I mean, when I started doing astrophotography, everything was very formulaic: don’t go above ISO 1600; have the widest aperture - f2.8; follow the rule of 500, or whatever. I always used to laugh, because I got asked by a photography magazine to write an article about the rule of 500, and I said, ‘I don’t believe in it,’ but I still wrote about it.

Ultimately: Just experiment. Push yourself until you’re uncomfortable, with things like your astrophotography. Do a lot of research… although you don’t need to do research either. You can just do whatever you want.

I remember one piece of feedback I got earlier on, with an astrophotography image, was ‘you’d get lose noise if you had a shorter shutter speed and shot with a lower ISO’and I thought, well you have no idea what astrophotography is about.

I’m not actually a fake-it-until-you-make-it sort of person. I’m just an experiment, test, and push yourself until you’re uncomfortable.

If you’re going out to shoot the night sky, have an idea of something that you wouldn’t normally do as well, so you can push yourself a bit further. Then look at it again later and think, what can I play around with next time to improve?

When I started doing multi-row panoramas, I also remember people saying, you can’t start doing ultra-wide multi-row panoramas! But everyone does multi-row Astro panoramas nowadays as well. Regarding just photography itselfit’s just, keep on practicing, and just shoot things.

I used to have a bit of philosophy as well to try as many things as possible, because you don’t know when something will be useful. I use flash photography for my astrophotography as well -- like in my selfies, for example. I know a lot more about lighting because I shoot other things, not just the astrophotography side of things. That also then leads into knowing more. I also use things like high noise exposures in normal photography. Everything is interchangeable.

You’re just pushing your boundaries and experimenting. Things can be used all over the place. It’s just, try something different, and experiment. Push your boundaries a lot.

LW: What’s something readers can look out for?

MG: I am working on some projects, but I’m still going through what goes into it. I have a lot of video sort of projects. My idea this year is hopefully to get about 100 timelapses done or so, but I’m still a bit behind schedule. There’s always factors that come into the equation, you’ve got to be a bit flexible about things.