During the pandemic, I attended one of the free public events hosted by the Chabot Space & Science Center as a way for people to gather in the safety of a (mostly) outdoor environment. The opportunity to look through their 30-ft refractor from 1915 was always special, but on this occasion I didn't even making it into the observatory. With a telescope that fit into the trunk of his car, an amateur astronomer in the parking lot was producing NASA-like images. I stood out there for an hour plying him with question after question.

Curiosity turned into late-night astronomy purchases to build my own setup. I enjoyed how this type of photography provided an altogether different form of mental engagement from my principal creative outlet: improvisational music. Whereas jazz thrives on spontaneity and responding in the moment, astrophotography demands painstaking planning and patience. One of the more time-consuming steps, for example, is aligning the tracking mount with the Earth’s axis so that as the stars rotate overhead, your setup can remain fixed on a specific target. If uncentered by less than a millimeter, your stars will streak.

Additionally, whereas daytime photography generally deals in fractions of a second, astrophotography requires exposures of five or more minutes. The same exposure must be repeated hundreds of times over many nights and then combined together in order to amplify the extremely faint light. But the duration of these long shots exponentially increases the chance of a small vibration compromising the roundness of your stars. Because of the time demands, it can sometimes be months between beginning a project and uploading it to my site. But, I enjoy that the precision forces me to slow down. There is something exciting about photographing the invisible, where the art is drawing the signal out from the noise.

It’s also a meditation. Making sense of the periodic movements of the night sky was likely among our first pursuits as pattern-seeking mammals—that is, as human beings. Like watching a fire, something about the night sky gets down to core, ancestral, genetic memory. One can’t help but feel something when considering that the light gathered by the lens of the telescope was emitted before humans existed and in the time it takes to reflect back, we may no longer be here.