National Geographic Magazine - UK August 2022

THE PREHISTORIC CLUSTER of standing stones known as Stonehenge has intrigued and mystified observers for centuries. The impressive monument has drawn millions of visitors to England’s Salisbury Plain. Throughout our publishing history, National Geographic has brought images and stories of Stonehenge to readers in new and exciting ways. The magazine’s very first picture of the megaliths is the black-and-white aerial photo to the right. Published in May 1922, it was made possible by the cutting-edge technology of that era: the airplane. For this issue’s cover story, we deployed the latest tools to bring you Stonehenge as you’ve never seen it. We assigned two inventive photographers: Alice Zoo documented people’s connections to Neolithic sites, and Reuben Wu turned landscapes into otherworldly realms steeped in mystery. Then we decided to go further:…

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE…

AT THE AGE OF 12, my twin sister and I embarked on a special type of education. For three years we attended a Quran school for girls in our home city of Istanbul. The experience stayed with me, and when I later became a photographer, I knew I had to return to it, with my Hasselblad camera in hand. For this project I visited my school and others across Turkey, where girls ages eight to 19 spend up to four years trying to memorize all 604 pages of the Muslim religious text. Some of these boarding schools provide secular classes, but the main focus is on learning the Quran, a traditional practice dating to the time of Muhammad. I wanted to document it—not only the discipline required to become a…

ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY IN THIS SECTION Moon Trash Crash Seashell in Peril Fusion’s Superpower Borscht Belt Revisited THE PRINT that artist Erika Blumenfeld shows me is an expanse of deep blue, a rich color that speaks of romance and night. It’s stippled with gold marks, some as lines, some as arrows, some as dots. Her art is formed by ink on paper—but it’s rooted in century-old artifacts, inspired by unsung astronomy pioneers, and animated by a quest to understand light. At the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three floors of metal cabinets house more than 550,000 glass plates, most of them eight by 10 inches, a photographic negative format dating from the mid-19th century. These plates recorded astronomical data from telescopes trained on celestial…

When the pandemic kept artist Erika Blumenfeld from accessing the glass plates to salvage the women’s original marks, she found another way, one that combined modern technology with ancient printmaking methods. Collaborating with the research-based studio Island Press at Washington University in St. Louis, she began with the digital photos captured during the DASCH scanning process and removed all the pixels in those images other than the women’s marks. Blumenfeld and her collaborators uploaded that digital file to a machine that etched the marks onto acrylic plates. They applied transparent ink onto the etched plates, and then pressed each one onto deep blue paper, which at the same time was pressed against thicker backing paper. The intaglio process embossed the blue paper, with the plate’s marks lifting off the sheet.…

DIGITIZATION PRESERVES the astronomical data on the Harvard Observatory glass plates. But preserving their cultural significance and honoring the women who deciphered them is a separate effort. As an observatory curator, Lindsay Smith Zrull focused on important findings of Harvard’s “women computers.” How many women? Zrull identified some 200 by name, another 160 only by initials. Though she came to Harvard after the digitization began, she helped ensure that a few hundred plates were kept with the marks intact. She named that collection for one of Harvard’s female astronomy pioneers, Williamina Fleming; its plates record discoveries by others, including: • Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who upon finding more than 2,000 stars whose light pulsed, realized that how quickly those changed was a way to measure inherent brightness and distance. • Annie…