About Seeking Starlight

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” - Marcus Aurelius

This website has a simple goal - to help you understand more about what you can see in the sky beyond the Earth and what it means to life on our little planetary backwater out on the edge of the Milky Way.

Here you find thought-provoking articles, superb astrophotography, and curated video that present interesting ideas from the past and present of astronomical discovery. You also find out more about what you can see in the sky, from double and multiple star systems and star clusters, from dazzling stellar nurseries to remnants of long-dead stars that seed the galaxy with the elemental building blocks of new solar systems.

Along the way, you gain the know-how and inspiration to see some of these things for yourself whenever you have time to look up.

Above all, Seeking Starlight is a place to help you think about nature on its grandest scale and to help you remember that, despite the proximate and often daunting concerns of everyday life on our small planet, the real action happens, and continues to happen, out there in the deep sky, as far as any telescope can ever see.

My Story

I’m currently a contributing editor at Sky&Telescope, the leading magazine for amateur astronomy in North America, where I write feature articles about stargazing and discoveries in astronomer, mostly related to stars.

But I’ve had a circuitous path into and out of astronomy and back again over the years.

I got my first telescope when I was five years old, completed my first university course in astronomy at the age of twelve. By the time I reached high school, my interest turned to math, physics, and computers which kept me busy for a long while. Eventually I turned back to astronomy for a few years and earned a master’s degree in the subject.

I decided (with some justification) that a career as a professional astronomer seemed like a good way to ruin a fine hobby. So I left the subject behind and earned a “practical” degree, a Ph.D. in laser physics and spectroscopy, and helped measure the spectral fingerprints of simple molecules found in interstellar space and planetary atmospheres. Then I worked as a research scientist in the field of lasers and fiber optics, helping to invent a few of the many bits and pieces that now make up the optical backbone of the internet. I hold thirteen patents and I’ve published many research papers related to laser technology. With all that, and raising a family, I didn’t think much about astronomy at all for more than 20 years.

But the call of the night sky is strong. In 2006, at the suggestion of a friend, I read a book by the superb astronomy writer Timothy Ferris called Seeing in the Dark, arguably the most elegant and literate book about stargazing ever written. I was hooked again.

Writing about a subject is perhaps the best way to learn more about it, so I began writing old-fashioned blogs about astronomy called One-Minute Astronomer and Cosmic Pursuits which had as many as 30,000 subscribers back in the internet’s better days. I’ve got a small collection of telescopes that serve my purposes, mostly good-quality refractors along with a Dobsonian for the faint stuff, a dedicated H-alpha solar telescope, and a few astronomy cameras to grab snapshots of what I see.

It’s hard to do justice to staggering beauty of the universe with words, or even with photos, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to try. There’s always something more to discover and understand when surfing the night sky. Join me and let’s head out under the stars to see what we can find together and what it all might mean.

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