“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.”

— Sheperd Doeleman, EHT Director and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. during a press conference on April 10, 2019 describing seeing something for the first time: a black hole photographed through a telescope.

In honor of today’s news–the first photograph through a telescope of a Black Hole–this gallery of images have one thing in common: to see the unseeable, they all required thirty-second-long exposures.

As part of the homework I gave my Long Exposure and Night Photography class at East End Arts, Riverhead, NY, I, too, did the assignment (see the above image of the road) and here are the unusual results. Low light/long exposure photography can reveal what was previously unseeable, like a nocturnal wonderland of color shifts, contrast, noise and the digital version of film’s reciprocity failure, all of which is not visible in daylight.