Babak Tafreshi photographs the night sky so humans can connect to it, and each other

On May 10, 2024, something unusual happened. Babak Tafreshi packed up his camera equipment and drove just an hour north of his home in Massachusetts to photograph the northern lights. For the first time in decades, they were visible as far south as Puerto Rico. On the way, he phoned Brian Skerry, his friend and fellow National Geographic Explorer.

“We planned to meet at the lighthouse,” Tafreshi recalls. Skerry is an underwater photographer, so he wasn’t as interested in capturing the sky that night. “But, he said it was one of the most striking things he has ever experienced.”

A powerful geothermal storm, caused by a spate of flares from the solar system’s only star created an unlikely sight of the aurora borealis. Tafreshi, a seasoned visual storyteller who has been photographing the night sky since the 1990s hadn’t experienced anything like it either. 

It was a shared moment for people around the world. It spoke to the unifying influence of celestial spectacles, and humans’ fascination with the cosmos that’s lasted for millennia. Civilization upon civilization have aligned their most sacred beliefs, and monuments, with the lights in the sky. And science confirms an invisible human-star thread: humans are, at their core, made of stardust. 

Two months ago, people scoured isolated roads for a place to catch the northern lights, and did so again the following day for a chance at another encounter. The internet was flooded with the same pink and green backdrop behind iconic, unexpected landmarks like San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Austria’s Grossglockner mountains, and the National Monument of Scotland, Edinburgh.

“It was unbelievable. I have seen auroras from many countries in both hemispheres, but never expected to see it from this latitude overhead,” Tafreshi says.

In a way, the event highlighted what Tafreshi has been working to communicate through his visual gallery: No matter where on Earth people are, they look up at the same sky.

When he was around 13 years old, sitting on his childhood rooftop in Tehran, Iran, Tafreshi got his first clear look at the moon. Through the peephole of his neighbor’s telescope, features invisible to the naked eye came alive. “Hundreds of craters. It almost felt like being in a spacecraft circling around the moon. That moment really triggered something very deep within me.”

Tafreshi would go on to become a science journalist, editor and photographer — known mostly for the way he photographs the dark sky — with a purpose. For nearly 30 years, Tafreshi has intentionally captured the view of space from Earth to spotlight one inarguable human universal:

“The night sky is an eternal roof above us. It has been there the whole time and it connects us through the past and future, a variety of ideas, cultures and beliefs we have. It’s like, ’one human, one sky,’” Tafreshi marvels. The message is clear when the same cluster of stars stays framed with changing foregrounds. Landmarks separated by space and time work as points of reference.

Tafreshi has immortalized stunning scenes of the planet’s star-studded roof as it appears on nearly every continent through photographs, videos and immersive media. His growing catalog of visual storytelling is a portal to connect humans to the sky, and each other. 

Archaeology, photography and geopolitics

Tafreshi spent his formative years in Tehran. He moved to the United States in 2014. 

“People know Iran as Muslim, but there are so many other religions and monuments from the past,” he acknowledges. 

Recent data show that 40 percent of Iranians identify as Muslim, while nine percent identify as atheists, six percent as agnostic and 22 percent of the population says they have no religious or spiritual affiliation, separate from agnosticism or atheism. The former Persian Empire, long considered one of the cradles of civilization, is steeped in a richly diverse histories, populated by societies of mixed ancestries, cultures and lifestyles. 

The pre-Islamic Zoroastrians are the oldest religious group in Iran that has survived to the present day. The ancestors of around 20,000 who follow the faith today used to build fire temples that are still standing, alongside the even more ancient Mithraic houses of worship, named after a reverence for Mithra, the Iranian God of the sun.

The minority Christian, Jewish and Sunni populations also comprise the religious mosaic of Iran. The oil-rich nation is also home to 300,000 people who identify as Bahai, a faith just 200 years young.

“So, this diversity of religion, monuments, civilizations and cultures provides you with plenty of sites to represent them,” Tafreshi says. It was natural, then, that he developed a passion for archaeology in his teenhood. This, coupled with his growing interest in night photography was the beginning of his fascination with the universe, that every human, alive, buried and yet to come into existence, calls home. 

So Tafreshi photographed the night sky above different historical sites in Iran through the 1990s, beginning to build a photographic celestial record from a global perspective. He studied physics, then worked as an astronomy and space journalist for magazines and hosted more than 100 television programs. He headed up a print publication. He fell in love.

“Nine hours. That’s the longest exposure I did on a single frame of film. And I had a totally different reason for that,” Tafreshi recalls. “It was during our date, with my wife. This gave me enough time to chat with her.”

Through a successful, marathon date one night in 1999, Tafreshi immortalized circumpolar star trails — streaks of light tails visible through long exposure photography that reveal the figure of stars orbiting the Earth.

In 2001 Tafreshi was on assignment in one of Zambia’s remote national parks to photograph a total solar eclipse. The night before the event, while the group of photographers and experts prepared for dinner, Tafreshi experienced a milestone moment in his appreciation for the unifying nature of the cosmos. 

“We were sitting around this fire. There was one German and one Polish Jew sitting next to each other. I looked around and saw the message visually with the night sky above us: We are just one people, one sky.” It became the slogan for his astrophotography project, The World at Night (TWAN), which would come to life in another six years. 

Meanwhile, “Iran was becoming more isolated, thanks to the Islamic Republic policies, with heavily filtered internet, hard-to-acquire foreign travel visas and a collapsing economy,” Tafreshi recalls. The revolution in 1979, several decades of sanctions being imposed, and the media portrayal of Iran as anti-Western further marginalized the country, and the reality was, to send an international message of solidarity from the Middle East, Tafreshi says he needed a partner. 

(Here's how this space scientist and environmentalist is working to preserve the night sky.)

He recruited Mike Simmons, based in Southern California, who had started his own association connecting people through a universal interest in astronomy. 

TWAN was born in 2007 to use astrophotography as a way of supporting the designation of dark sky places — as the problem of light pollution, even nearly 20 years ago, was already obscuring the view of the stars. The other important dimension to the project was “to bring this unifying message.” 

“In order to do that, you have to document very well-known landmarks because people need to resonate with the foreground,” Tafreshi stresses.

The World at Night’s vault houses thousands of finely selected imagery, many of which feature recognizable and beloved natural wonders and landmarks. Two hundred were curated for the book, The World at Night: Spectacular photographs of the night sky.

“The project that started as two people in the U.S. and Iran trying to break political boundaries,” is now a family of 40 photographers planted in more than 25 countries. The work directly supports DarkSky International, a recognized global authority protecting Earth’s natural darkness. 

In 2009 TWAN was named a special project by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for which Tafreshi and the team focused on capturing the night sky above World Heritage Sites. The same year, Tafreshi received the Lennart Nilsson Award, the most recognized scientific imaging award of the time.

The TWAN database supports a guest gallery where photographers can submit their night-sky images. As TWAN’s mission highlights, “Those involved in global programs learn to see humanity as a family living together on a single planet amidst the vast ocean of our Universe.”

The night sky is getting brighter

Over years of staring at the night sky, a few things stand out to Tafreshi. He’s documented atmospheric or astronomical phenomena, from red sprites and blue jets, lightning-like discharge that shoots upward from thunderclouds, to aurora borealis. Ball lightning, when lightning blasts into an orb, has never been photographed before. It’s on Tafreshi’s list. 

There are moments when he’s not sure what he’s looking at. “Some things were initially UFOs, then we find there is a natural explanation about this.” 

And then there are the things he cannot explain.

Rockets, satellites and other flying objects create ambiguity. “There are bright flares coming from satellites or meteors. I recently captured one of these flares, but it was not related to either of these two because of the color. So I don’t know exactly.”

Once, a “fuzzy star” moving slowly across the sky went from hardly visible, to a sudden, roaring bright cloud. “It was bright enough to cast shadows and it was coming overhead. I was ready for a ladder to come down and take me as a specimen,” he jokes. It turned out to be a failed rocket, satellite observers later confirmed, which outed a classified mission.

One thing that’s become more obvious to Tafreshi is how the view of the night sky is changing. The globe is more lit up than ever before. Only a few remote regions are exceptions and experience total darkness. The brightening of the skies from car lights, street lamps, advertisements and general human activity is also wreaking havoc on the natural rhythms of living things. Tafreshi references the 2016 American Medical Association announcement that “blue-rich white” LEDs (light-emitting diodes) create major human health issues, including cancer. 

“We are losing the night across the planet and people have no idea what they’re doing with these lights,” Tafreshi laments. 

His recent Instagram poll to nearly one million followers revealed that only 18 percent of respondents live in areas dark enough to see the Milky Way. 

“As a photographer, I have a responsibility for what I love, the night sky, to protect it.”

Life at Night

The World at Night has popularized astrophotography. And while the number of places from which to get a clear view of the night sky is shrinking, an opportunity for a new sector of vacation, astrotourism, is taking off. DarkSky International designates more than 200 protected dark sky places around the world and the list is steadily growing.

“These places will remain our refuge.”

“Astrotourism, cultural change, and the protection of dark sky places are moving, but light pollution is moving faster forward.”

Curbing harmful human-made light is much more within the realm of control compared to other crises.

“Although the impact is global, the change is fast, easy and the impact is immediate,” Tafreshi encourages, but it needs to start with awareness. 

Tafreshi’s latest project, Life at Night Atlas, will document how species relate to the night sky, dark environments, and artificial light at night. “For about three decades I looked to the sky, and my attention was about astronomy and science. But now, I look more to the earth and sky as a backdrop. The story is, what is happening to life on our planet at nighttime.”

True darkness matters for life on Earth. Some animals, including something as small as a dung beetle, rely on the visibility of the Milky Way as their compass. Artificial light exposes night time movers to predators, when they would naturally be camouflaged by the dark.

Working with other National Geographic Explorers including photographers, filmmakers, biologists, and light pollution specialists, Life at Night Atlas will produce visual stories about nocturnal animals, from night insect pollinators to bioluminescent phytoplankton and celestial bird navigators.

Tafreshi considers the growing awareness of light pollution since the inception of The World at Night a success story, with Life at Night Atlas adding a new dimension to how people can relate to the universe.

“The same Pale Blue Dot that Carl Sagan brought to us, it can be sensed when you’re standing under the night sky,” Tafreshi reflects. 

Through year after year of looking up, he says that this view has meant a more peaceful existence. 

“It gives you a perspective to better look at your own life and others in general. You can skip some of the minor problems, focus on the bigger issue,” he says. “Having this perspective of what is our place in the universe, I think it really helps.”

As Sagan pointed out, the Earth is just one point of light amidst infinite darkness. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us… a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

ABOUT THE WRITER
For the National Geographic Society: Natalie Hutchison is a Digital Content Producer for the Society. She believes authentic storytelling wields power to connect people over the shared human experience. In her free time she turns to her paintbrush to create visual snapshots she hopes will inspire hope and empathy.