Dean chats with Babak Tafreshi, National Geographic photographer, world explorer, and public speaker. Listen in to learn about how Babak captures the beauty of the world at night.
"Since the 1990s Babak Tafreshi has been documenting scenes of the night sky on all continents; an adventurous journey to connect Earth’s magnificent landmarks to celestial wonders, to bridge art, Earth, and science through visual storytelling. He is passionate about promoting the preservation of dark night skies, and nature conservation."
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: When you stargaze long enough, your mind tends to drift to the vastness of space. How big is the universe anyway? What's my place in the whole wide world? We're going to step back to look at the sky from a different perspective. My guest can definitely add his take from all the stargazing and astrophotography he's done from every continent of the Earth.
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up, the show that takes you deep into the cosmos, or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great. My guest today is Babak Tafreshi, National Geographic photographer, world explorer, and public speaker.
All right, so we're talking about perspective, and I'm going to start off with what is your address in space? As inhabitants of Earth, we're also part of larger and more complex systems. First off, we live on a planet, Earth is about 8, 000 miles wide, and we spin once every day, and for that size of a planet, that means for most places in the United States, to make that turn, to spin once every day, you're spinning on a globe at about 800 miles an hour.
Ooh, you're doing a lot right now. And then, of course, we've got the moon that orbits around the Earth. It's about 240, 000 miles away. I always like to think how long it takes to fly there, so travel time from Earth to the moon is about three days. Now, if we back up some more, we find the Earth is revolving around the Sun, along with seven other planets, more than 700, 000 asteroids, countless dwarf planets, innumerable comets, And everything that goes around the sun, that is in the solar system.
Travel time. To fly there, to go to Mars from Earth, right now with our technology, would take you about seven months. And if you wanted to go to Pluto, and you hitched a ride on the New Horizons spacecraft, the fastest mission we've ever launched off the Earth, that took nine and a half years to get to Pluto.
Feeling small? Oh, don't worry. It'll get worse. Way worse. But first Let's get another perspective on the entire universe. Babak, thanks so much for joining me today.
Babak Tafreshi: Oh, a pleasure to join you.
Dean Regas: Now, I've been following along with your astrophotography images for a long time. I'm a huge fan. And so how did you get started in this field and turn it into a most unique career?
Babak Tafreshi: It all started with the first look at the moon through a small telescope atop my family's apartment in the middle of Tehran in Iran, where I grew up. I was 13. I borrowed this small telescope, just a two inch reflector, almost like a toy telescope, but it was enough to resolve so many of moon details, craters, mountains, and the view was so striking to me that it simply changed my life.
Soon after I started to do a photography through a telescope, but then I realized my main passion is to make wide angle images of the night landscaping. in order to bridge between the earth and the universe, between also art and science. So that's how it all started. Later, I became a science journalist, writing for magazine, doing a TV program in Iran and astronomy space.
But photography was also coming along and became a more and more profound part of my career until in 2007, I started an international project called The World at Night, inviting other colleagues in other countries who are dedicated night sky photographers with the same perspective to the universe combining earth and sky.
And that project still continues today.
Dean Regas: And that's one of your book titles too, The World at Night. How would you describe the book and what went into its creation?
Babak Tafreshi: So that book is a group collaboration with most of the World at Night team members. We are currently 40 photographers in 20 countries and collection of 200 images from more than 60 countries.
And many of these images are fitting in different chapters. And one is the beauty of the night sky, which is forgotten in our modern world due to light pollution, busy life, being in urban areas. The other one is. How night sky works as. a unifying roof above all of us, one people, one sky, regardless of the cultural and religious or geographical position we have.
We are just under this eternal roof and this is a unifying bridge in the universe. It has been, in fact, true through the history of our civilizations as well. The other one is more on the world heritage and night sky, how some of these world heritage sites takes us back to time and also the night sky is like a time machine as well, and how you can see these iconic symbols of human civilization in a totally new light at nighttime.
And then a couple of chapters in the book. Focuses on the wonders of astronomy, celestial phenomena that are the most striking from eclipses to comets to meteor showers to conjunctions, and then stargazing destinations and the problem of light pollution. So this is Also covering the entire scope of our project since 2007, we are trying to promote the beauty of night sky in order to preserve the last remaining dark sky refuge on our planet in collaboration with a non profit called Dark Sky International based in southern Arizona.
Dean Regas: And now you're able to travel around the world, see eclipses from every continent auroras from most unique places. What is it about astronomical travel that excites you? And, what are your kind of favorite surprises from one of your trips?
Babak Tafreshi: Definitely the first 10, 20 years when I started, it was all about, capturing everything as much as possible.
And there are so many things happening, as you said, eclipses and comets and meteor showers. These are iconic displays in the sky, but there's so many other things that people never heard of. Atmospheric phenomena, which are surprising, and some people may even report them as UFOs, a fireball, exploding meteor in the sky, or could be more about conjunctions between planets could be about a new star, which is about to erupt.
We call it Nova or even a supernova. In the past few years, I have shifted my scope from. Not only capturing the astronomical perspective of the night sky, but also how it connects to life on our planets, how many species are living based on the natural rhythm of the sky and natural darkness of the night.
This is not only the nocturnal species, which is a big portion of life on the planet. Our planet is very active at night, but also some other species who need natural darkness and the stars to navigate. For example, birds, majority of migratory birds are flying at night time. And this project, called Life at Night Atlas with National Geographic Society started officially a year ago and that's my new scope. I'm looking now down on earth at night time but still the sky appears in the backdrop.
Dean Regas: And for the last few years you've been leading or contributing mightily to the main stargazing and photography retreat. Tell me more about that workshop and what guests get to see and do.
Babak Tafreshi: With all the Projects I have in hand with National Geographic and also my own non profit for The World at Night, I only have time for four or five workshops or photo tours. A couple of them are in Iceland, one is in Canary Island, one in New Zealand.
California, usually, but the one I always do, not far from my hometown, Boston, is Maine Stargazing and Photography. It has a combination of both stargazing, just for people who wants to see the truly dark sky, and also those who want to learn about astrophotography in different levels. And I realize most of the participants who came to these programs after, at the end, They have a very profound change.
They have experienced something unique. And this was not maybe the case 40 years ago, the darkest guy was still available to most people. But today only a small fraction of us can see the Milky Way. I recently did a poll on my social media with about 1 million people and, about 10 percent participated.
And out of that, we realize. Less than 20 percent of the participants can see the Milky Way based on this poll from their living area. And my followers are very international. If we do this only in Europe and North America, that percentage is probably less than 5 percent because most of us are living in places which is dominated by city sky glows.
So seeing and experiencing a natural night sky became a life changing experience for many people.
Dean Regas: And what projects are coming up that you're most excited about?
Babak Tafreshi: I just finished a couple of projects for life at night. One was on fireflies. These species are of course, the beauty of our childhood dreams that we no longer see because of climate change, pesticides and light pollution.
They're very sensitive to artificial light and they disappear because they only signal each other in the natural darkness. If there is a bright LED, they don't signal each other and the signals are for mating, no mating, no population. So I documented fireflies in the Great Smoky National Park.
They are a group of them, species of them known as the synchronous. And there are millions of them in one place glowing the entire forest. I did another project in Texas on bats and how they navigate at night, how they come out of the night. Caves and we went to a couple of caves with more than 10 million bats in one place, which was very striking.
Dean Regas: This has been great talking with you, Babak. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks so much for sharing your passion for the subject and giving me some ideas of maybe I can try it a few, try a few pictures myself.
So what's next in our journey through the universe? Beyond the solar system, we find the stars at night.
The closest star is 25 trillion miles away. Travel time, if you wanted to go with the New Horizons spacecraft again, it would take you about 70, 000 years to get there. Yeah, you'd be dead. That's right. Correct. Yep. And then we back up even further. Those stars are just a tiny portion of one spiral arm of our pinwheel shaped galaxy called the Milky Way.
And our Milky Way galaxy has between 200 and 400 billion stars in it. The Sun is just one of those stars. And then the next major galaxy out is called the Andromeda Galaxy. Distance to that is estimated to be about 2. 5 million light years away. That means the light that left that galaxy left it two and a half million years ago, and you can just barely see it up in the nighttime sky.
And then that galaxy and the Milky Way are part of a bigger group called the Local Group, and then that group is one teeny tiny section of the entire universe, which the latest estimates put at having about two trillion galaxies in it. How does that make you feel? Big. Important. Mighty. Central. Yeah, I know.
But, at least you know your address now. You got the Earth Moon System, Solar System, Milky Way, Local Group, Universe. Alright. There's some other steps in there along the way that I could have included, but I figured I just threw a lot at you and did not want to completely overwhelm you. But in case you need to send a package to somebody on earth, that's the full address. Aliens, send us stuff. That's where we are.
Looking Up With Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created it in 2017. Ella Rowen is our show producer and editor and is the center of the universe, according to many. Marshall Verbsky assists with audio production and editing and loves living on the edge of the universe. Lots more space there, that's for sure.
Jenell Walton is our Vice President of Content, and Ronny Salerno is our Digital Platforms Manager. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. I'm Dean Regas and keep looking up!
