the celestial enquiries · no. 01
the light audit
how high the sun stood, at every encounter
Most photographs in the collection carry a recorded time and place. Between them they fix a third thing the museum never recorded deliberately: the position of the sun. For each of the 9,365 located, timestamped works the museum has computed the sun's elevation — its height above or below the horizon, in degrees, with an approximate correction for atmospheric refraction. The result is an audit of the light the practice was working in, assembled from evidence the archive was already holding.
A record of working conditions. These counts describe when encounters were photographed. Without hours spent looking in each light band, they cannot tell us which light makes an 8 easier to find. The Sun’s elevation is modelled, not a measurement of scene brightness: cloud, shade, buildings and artificial lighting matter too.
read the chart as a table
| Elevation interval | Encounters |
|---|
the bands
the collection distributed by the light it was found in
findings
recovered from the archive; interpretations remain provisional
On the museum's working light. The median encounter was made with the sun 33.2° above the horizon; the same elevation can occur at different times depending on season and latitude.
On darkness. 958 works lie below the model’s −0.833° threshold, and 480 of them under a sun more than eighteen degrees below the horizon, which is to say during astronomical night. The committee notes that the museum does not stop noticing when the light does.
On the extremes. The lowest modelled elevation is 78.8° beneath the horizon; the highest is 88.2° above it. Neither is a record of how bright the photograph was.
On late light. 65 works have the Sun above the horizon between 22:00 and 04:00 camera-local time. Late sunlight alone does not establish a 24-hour polar day: latitude, season and clock conventions matter.
On countries. Country comparisons are loading. These describe the collection’s itinerary and timing, not national climates.
On method. Elevations were computed from the coordinates recorded by the camera and the true UTC instant of each exposure, taken from the GPS clock where the photograph carries one and from the timezone offset written by the device otherwise. The NOAA-based model applies an approximate refraction correction. The legacy band boundary at −0.833° is retained for continuity, though standard sunrise conventions apply that threshold to an unrefracted solar centre. These classifications should not be read as precise observed sunrise or sunset times. See NOAA’s calculation notes.
The museum does not choose its light, and never adds any. Axiom 3 forbids the practitioner to touch, alter, clean, rearrange — or light — the 8 or its surroundings, so every work in the collection was photographed under whatever illumination happened to be falling on it at the moment of encounter: the sun at the elevations recorded above, or a streetlamp, a shop window, a passing headlight, the moon. The archive records the consequence. The committee, invited to set a preferred elevation for future fieldwork, has declined, observing that the practice has managed without one. The Moon now has its own enquiry: consider the moon.