Michael Hettrick

The artist, Dr. Michael C. Hettrick, is a retired research physicist with 49 years of experience in astronomy. His first astrophoto was the film image of Jupiter and its moons in 1977. During the past ten years, he has captured (using eight different custom astrograph telescopes) and processed all the astrophotos being offered here for sale. The observing sites were both local (in the USA and Japan) and at remote Bortle 1-3 "dark sky" locations in west Texas, northern Chile, southern Australia, La Palma island, South Africa and Namibia. Typical exposure times per image were 10-40 hours, but dimmer objects and/or mosaics composing wide fields required exposures as long as 100-150 hours.

A CMOS camera (digitally-recorded) image subsequently photographically imprinted onto backlit translucent film provides an extremely high dynamic range in displayed intensities (factors of thousands) in comparison to normal photographic prints (a factor of ~ 50). This is important for viewing astronomical images, where the nebulae are many orders of magnitude dimmer than the stars. The films used by Hettrick are of the premium "Duratrans" brand, invented by Kodak in the 1970's, licensed to Fujifilm (and rebranded as "Fujitrans") for continued produc...

1980 B.Sc., Magna Cum Laude in Physics
Minors in Astronomy and Mathematics
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY USA


1997 Ph.D. in Plasma Physics
The Graduate University for Advanced Studies
Gifu, Japan

Tokyo International Art Fair
November 28-29, 2025
Roppongi, Tokyo Japan

Hettrick was awarded the "Sakura Prize" for Outstanding Performance at this exhibition.

Ether Exhibition
Hiltopia Art Gallery
October 1 - October 5, 2026
Hilton Tokyo B1, 6-6-2 Nishishinjuku
Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0023 Japan