Happy New Year and welcome to 2026

 Another year under the stars

Loading and unloading equipment boxes into the car.  Setting up astrophotography rigs under winter skies so clear they feel almost fragile.  While fingers stiffen in the intense cold, my breathe will condense and then disappear in the dark, an ethereal vanishing fog. Beneath my feet, frost-hardened grass and frozen mud will crunch softly — a reminder that I am here, present, awake under the night sky.

This new year, I will once again, embark upon my stargazing night forays; not to escape the world, but to remember how truly vast the night sky is, and how impossibly small our planet becomes beneath it.  

Above me, stars will shine with quiet intensity and I will, once more, marvel about these photons of light reaching my eyes - ancient messengers that have travelled for millions, sometimes billions, of years. Light that began its journey before mountains rose, before continents split, before life stirred in primordial swamps. These tiny bursts of energy will have witnessed the rise and fall of entire worlds, and only now - on these nights - will they finally arrive, touching the back of my eyes. The same light once seen by our earliest ancestors, arriving from the farthest frontiers of an ever-expanding universe.

We call it starlight. Standing there, it will, again, feel like something more - like the universe reaching out from all directions at once, quietly reminding me: “you are part of this too.”

And so, I will step into another year - my fourth year following this learning journey through astronomy and astrophotography. Once again, I will stand beneath constellations that ancient civilizations traced into stories and maps of gods and heroes. This night, I will know them as vast stellar furnaces of hydrogen with new borne suns and spiral pillars of bright stars drifting in seas of dark matter.

Knowing this will not lessen their mystery for me. It will deepen it. Just as understanding the biology of a flower in my garden never steals the joy of its fragrance, so understanding the physics of the universe will only expand my sense of wonder. Knowledge does not replace awe - it gives it more room to breathe.

This year there will be more nights spent bathing in an ocean of photons - light arriving from inconceivable distances, from planets, moons, bright stars, glowing molecular clouds, and distant galaxies. Astronomy will once again teach me the same lesson: scale.

My life - a flicker in cosmic time - lived on a pale blue world orbiting an ordinary star. Yet under the night sky, I won’t feel small. I will feel expanded, as if the cosmos is lending me a fragment of its eternity simply for showing up and looking up.

I will once more plant my tripod in the dust of an anonymous car park, align my lens with Polaris and the steady rotation of the Earth, and breathe slowly. I will wait – patiently - for the invisible to reveal itself. Every exposure will become a quiet conversation between human patience and cosmic time. Perhaps this night it will be another softly glowing nebula - atoms colliding and collapsing, gravity shaping gas into form, the raw ingredients of future worlds quietly gathering.

It would be tempting to think that capturing these images means witnessing the universe building its future, light-year by light-year. But I will know that isn’t quite true. The photons I collect will carry messages from what was, not what will be. Every image will be a glimpse into the past - galaxies and stars as they once existed -  funnelled through lenses and sensors and processed here in the present moment.

And so, I will continue to return – more nights under the stars will follow.

I will return for the silence - not an empty silence, but a full one. A silence where my thoughts will settle gently, like dust on a mirror. A silence where the boundary between myself and everything beyond me will feel thin, almost permeable.

Under the stars, science will become personal and an exciting story once more. Philosophy will become a sky. And my heart will open just enough to hold two truths at once: the fragility of human life, and the quiet immortality of starlight.

Astronomers and astrophotographers will return to the darkness again and again over 2026 - not for the darkness itself, but for the infinite light it holds, patiently waiting to be seen.

I wish them all a Happy New Year and clear skies for the entire year, wherever in the world they may be!

Steve 

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