This chapter takes up the literary reverberations of two types of photography – still and moving – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The invention and popularization of still photography in the nineteenth century posed a challenge to all existing forms of representation, visual or otherwise: Whereas earlier forms offered necessarily imperfect, inexact, and approximate renderings of depicted subjects, the detached “camera eye” promised total transparency, accuracy, and objectivity. With the invention of silent film and, later, talkies, the camera extended its dominion of objective representation into further dimensions and modalities. Carver reads work by William Empson, William James, W. H. Auden and others to argue that cameras served “not only to make the visible world familiar, as early inventors hoped they might do, but also to make it strange.”

The main tool for studying stars is the spectrograph.Here we look at the astronomical aspects of spectrographs, how they work, and how to optimize them for stellar work.The characteristics of diffraction gratings are a central theme.The roles of the collimator and camera are then discussed, as is the resolving power of the final unit.Spectrographs using gratings in low orders are contrasted to echelle spectrographs used in high orders.Interferometers and Fourier spectroscopy isdiscussed briefly, as are some aspects of telescopes.