SHOOTING STARS

Astrophotography requires patience, explains Chris Baker, who has just begun imaging the skies of the Southern Hemisphere.

The sky at night is full of wonders that become ever more extraordinary the closer you look. Chris Baker has turned his passion for astrophotography into a career creating extraordinary images of the heavens, and now he is turning his eyes and his telescope to the stars of the Southern Hemisphere.

When you look to the skies at night, what do you see? If your home is in Sydney or Melbourne, the lights of the city may restrict your ability to see much more than the twinkling lights of a thousand stars above, and the moon brightly beaming down. If you live out in the bush, a clear dark night will reveal the long trail of the Milky Way across the sky, and a million more stars than your city-dwelling compatriots can hope to see.

Yet there is so much more waiting to be discovered. Peer through a telescope and other wonders can be revealed — the craters of the Moon, the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter, or hazy glowing areas between and around stars revealing vast nebulae of cosmic dust and gas clouds, some of them the birthplaces of new stars.

To see still more, you can add another dimension to the equation: that of time. In astrophotography a long exposure can capture details too faint to be visible in a single moment. It’s this search for the hidden beauty of the heavens that has fascinated astrophotographer Chris Baker since he was a boy.

“I have been interested in the cosmos for as long as I can remember,” he tells Science Illustrated. “I recall as a child my father pointing out the constellations, then later buying me a small telescope to observe the moon, Saturn and Jupiter. I was hooked, and ever since I’ve felt an affinity for the sky, for seeing the stars and being under the darkness.”

Not until decades later, however, did Chris expand his hobby in earnest, investing in a Celestron 12-inch telescope and observing the skies from his home north of London in