Backyard Astronomers

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Doha, Qatar – Among the high beams of traffic rolling along the desert highway; the spotlights streaking upwards from a World Cup stadium across the flyaway; and the lights, dust, exhaust and grill-smoke that Doha and its two million residents are pumping into the air, a telescope in a homemade observatory is pointed towards a brown sky. Despite it all, the stargazer inside, Ajith Everester, is looking for light from much, much farther away.

“When you photograph galaxies that are far – really far, 35 million light years – when you get the first image on your screen, even when I say it, I get goosebumps,” he says.

Ajith, 42, who manages the installation of specialised Japanese pumps for big construction projects by day, started taking astrophotographs in 2017 after six years as a nature photographer. He built his observatory from pencil sketches and bespoke metal parts. Under its dome are a long white telescope on a mount, two computer monitors, piles of equipment and a small mattress. The gear is on: humming, clicking, beeping, whirring, and ever so slowly, turning.

Also on the rooftop: his 11-year-old daughter, her telescope rig, eight satellite dishes and a few air conditioning units.

Ajith looks up, I look up, and she looks into her telescope; I wonder where any stars could possibly be hiding behind that brown sky. Squinting, I can barely see a single one.

He points to it – Orion’s Sword. Look underneath the belt, he says, to the left, the star in the middle: that’s the one he’ll photograph first, because there is a huge, beautiful nebula right in the middle of it that cannot be seen with the naked eye, and he cannot wait to show it to me, even though he’s already seen it a thousand times.

Astrophotography is a hobby, an art, and sometimes, a science. It has thousands of passionate practitioners around the world. For many, it is an obsession. With a few thousand dollars of consumer-grade equipment, anyone, anywhere can turn stargazing into space portraiture. It takes practice, research and endless patience.

During the pandemic, with many people rediscovering what it means to be alone, the astrophotography community has grown and deepened. If you log online after a cloudless night, Twitter, Instagram and specialised communities like AstroBin are endless scrolls of successes, experiments, failures, comments, tips, praise and new beautiful images of the splendours of our cosmos.

“AstroBin more than doubled in size since the pandemic,” Salvatore Iovene, a founder of the site, wrote in an email to Al Jazeera. “The whole industry swelled 2-3x, according to what I hear from many other companies in the business of amateur astronomy.”

Embracing connections on Earth while looking into deep space, astrophotographers have reached out to each other online to learn and teach the craft, set up clubs, or just chat over cold evenings in the dark. Some are finding new objects never before photographed. Most are searching for something new to see.

Salvatore believes that “AstroBin gained a lot of more casual users” during the pandemic. He says “the site now gets about 10,000 likes daily”.

In Ajith’s observatory in Doha, the computer beeps, the telescope moves a little bit westward, our first image of the Orion Nebula is done. Time to look.

“I love the moon,” Stacey Downton says from her home in Birmingham, United Kingdom, but “I have to be in the mood for the moon. When I do shoot the moon, I like to do mosaics: you focus on a tiny portion, and you stitch them together. I did a moon mosaic [with] 18,000 frames in total, stitched it, and got this really detailed picture of the moon. And I do love a moody moon shot – clouds over the moon.”

Stacey, 32, is an x-ray technologist for the National Health Service (NHS). She started taking astrophotographs in 2018, and built a community of friends she also helps teach. In a hobby dominated by men, she would like to help challenge the gender imbalance and gives tutorials on YouTube.

The pandemic burned her out, she says. Visiting hospitals, working near front-line providers for much of 2020 and 2021, she came home exhausted and stopped going to her back garden to look up. A small gathering of fellow enthusiasts changed that this autumn, when she spent a weekend on a farm under a dark sky reserve. She came home and shot an image of the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula (constellation Cepheus, 3,000 light years away). Once again, she was enraptured.

Astrophotography is where stargazing meets digital photography and in-computer post-production; it is far more involved than looking, pointing and shooting. Rather its hobbyists do a sort of excavation by light. To make just one final picture, they take hundreds or thousands of images of the same target, over hours, days, weeks, even years; then they stack all of them on top of one another and lift a single, final image from a noisy backdrop.

Outer space is bright and dark, and both are challenges. In our own solar system, there are planets, moons, comets and two space stations – all worthy targets for photographers. But beyond, there are stellar nebulae, clouds of dust where stars are born. These make some of the most striking targets: diverse in shape, enormous, funky. There are planetary nebulae, a misnomer for the remnants of supernovae, large stars that died spectacularly and ejected their materials outwards at thousands of kilometres per second. There are jets, shockwaves, plumes, binary pairs, wisps of dust.

And that’s just inside our own Milky Way, the hundred-thousand light-year-diameter disc we live in. Beyond, there are the galaxies.

Thousands of them can be seen from a hobbyist’s telescope on Earth during springtime, when the Earth’s night-side faces deep space. Our nearest neighbour, Andromeda, with whom we will crash in billions of years, is 2.5 million light-years away.

“Often I think doing astrophotography is like looking back in time,” Stacey explains. “The light from the Pleiades (a group of bright stars in the Taurus constellation, historically significant in almost every ancient culture and observed by Galileo’s own telescope) left when the Spanish Armada was trying to invade England. I wonder, what was happening on Earth when that light left that system? It’s now at the end of its journey, falling on my sensor. It’s mind bending and pretty cool.”

Capturing photons, as the astrophotographers like to say, requires the gear, a clear, cloudless night and persistence.

“When it goes wrong,” Stacey says, “it goes spectacularly wrong.”

J-P Metsavainio, 58, lives in Oulu, Finland, just below the Arctic Circle. He can count the cloudless nights he sees per year: “35 to 40,” he says. For these rare evenings, the stargazer has missed two weddings, one funeral and many dinner parties.

A quarter-century ago he bought a telescope for his wife, and they both got dizzy looking at Saturn’s rings and moons while a taxi idled in waiting. He was swept away.

Last year he produced a work that took 12 years to assemble: a landscape of the entire arc of the Milky Way, layered with so much detail it fills 2 gigapixels and includes millions of stars.

Buried inside it, but just as special to J-P, is an object that had never been photographed before.

So faint it almost disappears into its backdrop, W63 is a 200,000-year-old supernova remnant, expanding outwards at 4,000 kilometres every second, spanning hundreds of light years in diameter. He read about it in research papers, devoted 200 hours of exposure time to capture its light, and gathered just enough photons to trace its outline.

Hidden somewhere inside the bubble is a source of intense x-ray radiation that lights up the oxygen atoms along its edge (shown in blue). The photo was featured as a NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day – an APOD – one of the holy grails of the community.

For J-P, the physics and aesthetics motivate the work.

“You have been a star, and you will be a star, after really long periods of time. There is beautiful symmetry, and I love that. They’re really meaningful objects for me … they’re beautiful in so many levels.”

“I’m 60 percent colourblind,” says Loran Hughes, a 64-year-old from Medford, Oregon in the United States who has been taking astrophotographs since 2016. He’s red-green colourblind, meaning he has trouble distinguishing between the two. It’s a surprising revelation given the richness in his images.

But colours are subjective in astrophotography, the pictures mostly begin in black and white. The photographer uses filters to isolate signals from excited atoms in space – hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen – the universe’s smallest objects sketching the contours of its largest.

Loran chooses his own, as do many of the astrophotographers I interviewed. “[The final picture] looks the way I want it to look,” he says.

Loran is retired from the air force and currently the chief technology officer for a local realty group in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon. His house is surrounded by tall redwood trees that completely obscure the horizon, where many of the great targets tend to lie.

He has six telescopes, three mounts and a lot of other gear. He sets it up in the driveway and controls it from his office along with a hot cup of tea.

During daylight hours, he sometimes photographs the sun, which requires special filters of its own. He caught a fleeting image of what looks like clouds hovering over its fiery outer layer. He is perpetually refining his process, adding things to see.

At night, he digs in to nebula and galaxies, and posts everything online.

“It gives me peace to do this. The last year and a half has been rough for our family. My daughter passed away of cancer. That was a rough time. That gave me the outlet to get out, do something different … to get away from the everyday problems.

“Sometimes it’s nice to be able to disconnect from the world for an evening, and look at a bigger picture. That’s what I see when I’m looking at a nebula that’s 1,800 light years away. It’s beautiful. It just tells us that our lives are so minuscule compared to the universe. It’s mind blowing.”

The Orion Nebula in particular is a family favourite.

“I feel like I see her every time I look up.”

A surprising number of astrophotographers live and practise in the middle of dense cities.

A few years ago, Markice Stephenson was in his early twenties, studying philosophy, when he watched a television series called How the Universe Works. He lives in south central Los Angeles, and at the time, he was working at an Amazon warehouse, reading 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and thinking about determinism.

The documentary sparked his curiosity. He signed up for a basic astronomy course at his college, bought a telescope and followed popular astrophotographers on YouTube. He bought another telescope, then another.

“I can’t explain the experience. When I first went outside [to shoot astrophotography], it was overwhelming. I got to do something I never thought of. I hadn’t seen a nebula prior to 2017, I don’t think I could have recalled even the most popular NASA image. Now that I was shooting it, it was insane to me.”

In early March 2020, he swiped his badge at the Amazon warehouse and the gate didn’t open: he had been laid off. Back at home, in lockdown, working now as a caregiver for a family member with a disability, and with a room full of new astro gear, he dug in fully.

He has spent the last two years shooting deep space photos from a vantage point between a row of apartments, through a net of power lines, facing a huge light fixture that never turns off.

The sky above Markice’s house – like the brown sky in Doha – is “Bortle level 9”, the highest level on the Bortle scale, meaning the area is so saturated with light that only the brightest objects are visible to the naked eye. John Bortle, an amateur astronomer too, published the scale in 2001 in Sky and Telescope magazine. There are apps that track it, and whole organisations devoted to consecrating dark sky sanctuaries that achieve the coveted Bortle 1, where the Milky Way galaxy is so bright it casts a shadow on the ground. Most people now live at the higher end of the Bortle scale.

When California goes into rolling blackout power outages, Markice cheers and runs his telescope outside. The barrel is almost a metre long and an armful wide, covered in blinking equipment, sitting on a mount with a star tracker on its side and various hi-tech boxes attached.

“I’ve had some weird experiences,” he says, “it isn’t the safest neighbourhood.” His neighbours look out for him and his gear while he’s shooting.

During daylight hours, he makes spreadsheets to remind him when targets will rise, “I have a looong list”. He has spent more than 100 hours on some projects, just to cut through the light pollution. If he had access to a really dark sky, he says, he would happily image the dust that hangs between star systems.

He captured a jet of material puncturing a nebula and posted it with notes about the physics. He captured the Veil Nebula, which looks like the ribbons of a just-popped soap bubble. Online, he posts as LeftyAstro, and does not remove the background stars from the final frame as some other photographers do. “That’s a choice,” he says. “Some people use techniques to reduce the stars, neuter the star field. I like to display the whole nature of the region.”

Markice is 25, and may continue studying astronomy or pursue a PhD. For now, he is keeping watch on his nebulae, hoping to return to them in the future.

“I’m thinking of stars exploding, expansion, how five years from now I could see some movement in there, [zoom through] my data so I can see each image after each other, really fast, just popping around … it’s overwhelming to me.”

It’s midnight in Doha and Ajith is taking me on a tour of the universe as he sees it, while the telescope above us collects photons.

Orion is the closest large star-nursery to Earth, just over a thousand light years away. It’s often the first image a new astrophotographer takes. It was among the first astro photos ever, shot on a plate of glass in 1880. It’s majestic, with arching crescents and ripples that flow across what could be a giant cosmic cloak. But it’s bright, so bright that overexposure is easy.

Ajith shows me the first picture, which has some definition at the edges, but is completely white – overexposed – at the centre. He is meticulous and would never use this to compose a final product, but he will take a hundred more before the image is ready.

He flicks through the filters to reveal the structures as seen in sulfur, in oxygen, in hydrogen. It is not about how far away the object is, he says, but about how you focus and expose it.

“Light always travels,” he says with faith, “how faint, how strong, that’s the difference.”

I ask him if he skips past the moon now to look exclusively at the far away and hard-to-spot nebulae. No, he tells me, almost offended, “you’ll fall in love with the moon, any time you see it, you’ll fall in love!”.

So we look at the waning gibbous moon for a while in real time, and he’s right. It is a third of a million kilometres away, but through the telescope it feels like you could touch the crumbling edges of Tycho, its belly button-like crater.

“That’s what passion does to you. I never thought I would get so crazy,” he laughs and gestures to the mattress on his rooftop, “I have a four-bedroom villa, but I sleep here.”

Like J-P in Finland, Ajith was inspired to photograph space by a family member, his daughter. She wanted to look at the planets, then he developed an obsession. Now it’s something they pursue together.

“I have friends in India” – Ajith is from Tamil Nadu – “who have found new nebulae, and named them in their names. I wish I could find something in the Doha sky and give it my name, and be in history. I haven’t yet. I’m still looking.”

It seems almost like a superpower, this ability to look through the atmosphere knowing just how thin it is, how above it, there are millions of wonders broadcasting photons all the time, and how anyone can capture them just before they extinguish in the dirt.

“What is my favourite image?” Ajith barely turns away from the screen, “I can’t choose. I love all my images, even the latest one, even if it’s good or bad.”