Photos: With cyanotype, Brown student uses sun to visualize moon

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (Brown University) — The sun shone without a cloud in the sky, but the moon was the real star.

Logan Tullai, a senior at Brown, and a group of volunteers gathered on Brown’s Pembroke Field on a recent warm day to create large silk prints of lunar craters using cyanotype — a photographic process invented in the 1800s that creates blue prints using ultraviolet rays.

“It seemed really interesting to me to make prints of the moon with the UV rays of the sun,” said Tullai, who received a scholarship from the Brown Arts Institute to support the project. “With cyanotype, everything is blue, so there’s also this fun ‘blue moon’ element.”

Under a homemade shade structure, Tullai and a team of about 30 students and volunteers unrolled a roll of film—about 10 inches by 60 feet long—and laid it flat on a long strip of blue silk coated with a special formula of iron compounds. With the precision and speed of a production line, they covered the film with plexiglass, securing it every few inches with a clip so the film wouldn’t slip or move during the exposure process.

By Tullai’s count, everyone stood up, lifted the shade structure in unison, and placed it under the sun’s blazing UV rays to expand for about 10 minutes while the volunteers rested in the shade of nearby ash trees.

After a timer was set and the clips were removed, Tullai and a handful of assistants carefully rinsed the silk until the blue-green water ran clear; then they returned to the assembly line as they hung the silk—now sporting crisp white and teal images of the moon—on a clothesline to dry.