Shooting Stars

The first time we drove far into the mountains to camp away from the city lights and countless streetlights of the suburbs, I was shocked at what the night sky actually looked like. I remember trying to wrap my 8-year-old brain around the fact that they were always there, even at my own house, just hidden by artificial light. My mother would constantly pull out random facts or bring up hobbies I never knew she had. One of which happened to be astrophotography. She taught me that you could take pictures of the night sky, over minutes, over hours, and watch the night sky spin above us, like the sun arced over us every day. It wouldn’t be until years later that I understood the physics of space. As a kid, though, watching it and capturing it myself was more than enough. I had to learn more, I had to try it.

After I discovered the night sky, I picked up a camera and never put it down. I begged to go back to the mountains to camp, and each time we did, my awe of the night sky would be refreshed. I tried my very best to bring those moments home with me on my humble little camera.

As time went on and I entered my teens, I slowly started to find new interests, friends, and as a result, spent less time with my parents and less time with the camera. School pushed its way to the top of the priority list, and my childhood hobbies fell to the bottom. Summers became a time to spend friends. Our family camping trips slowly dwindled down to once a summer, close to home, until they stopped altogether. 

If you’ve ever had a best friend in elementary school that you’ve lost touch with as you grew up, the cosmos were like that for me. What once brought so much joy, and awe, and drove me to spend hours researching and experimenting with my camera was now something I occasionally acknowledged. Occasionally, I would be inspired to look up at night and yearn to spend time with the countless sparkling white dots and the shutter’s sound clicking away in the darkness. Then, immediately getting distracted by the day-to-day of life and quickly forgetting, time after time. What was once a tool I used to express creativity and capture light from light-years past, turned into mere decoration. My camera became a trivial symbol that said “I’m a photographer” to onlookers like a keychain. And like a keychain, I kept with me at all times. Whether in the trunk of the car, or a backpack, it was always within reach. It was like a safety net that I could fall back on if I ever felt like I lost in an identity crisis. Even though I always had it with me, I would go months without ever turning it on, let alone taking any pictures. After all, if I just wanted a quick snapshot, the phone was plenty adequate and a lot more convenient. For years like this, I went on without pointing my camera to the sky that inspired me so much as an 8-year-old discovering the Milky Way for the first time.

All teens go through their jaded periods. I’ve been there. If I was in one of those moods when I came across the news, things might have turned out completely different, but I wasn’t. I was in an excitable mood when I heard NASA had discovered a new comet that would be visible in the next month. Something about that fanned the embers of my curiosity. It’s hard to explain. It was a combination of a once-in-a-lifetime event. I couldn’t miss all combined with the guilt that had built up over the years of not using the camera; and discarded opportunities. I dove into the news, doing research of where it would be visible and doing calculations of what kind of shot I could get of it. Before I knew it, I was begging my parents again, to go camping, to go see it together.

It had been a couple years since we went camping at the same spot that kicked off this whole photography journey, but I knew that exactly where we had to go.

The drive out to the mountains seemed much shorter than it had years ago. The car was filled with the familiar scent of old camping trips mixed with a thin layer of “garage.” The familiar feeling of being in the car with my parents driving out to the mountains was a weird mix of warmth, nostalgia, and embarrassment. After all, I had barely spent any time in the back seat of my parent’s car in the last couple of years.

Before getting the tents set up or anything else, we all scouted for the perfect spot to set up the tripod. We looked at the map and the trajectory of the comet together. As night fell, we huddled around the camera, bundled up to stay warm, and enjoyed the night sky again, as we did before. The stars became brighter, and my old friend welcomed me back like no time had passed between us. Like best friends do. All three of us had our eyes glued to the sky more than ever before. Watching. Waiting for the comet to come into sight. I could see the sky slowly spinning above us with the Milky Way slowly rising, peeking out from above the horizon line off in the distance. “There it is!” Mom and Dad shouted simultaneously. I quickly hit the shutter button and spent the next couple minutes firing off shot after shot as the comet arced over us. I dialed in the camera and hit the shutter one last time to capture this moment. When I looked up from the tiny screen and allowed myself to take in the moment, I could have sworn I could feel the cold streak of the comet running across my face.