My name is Zaya Irving. I'm seventeen, I live in Troy, Maine, and on clear nights I drag a telescope into my backyard and point it at things that are millions of light-years away.
When I first started this hobby with my tiny Celestron refractor I did not know what I would find.
After spending months working to improve my pictures, getting the Dwarf Mini was the turning point. Since then I’ve been building up a collection of deep-sky objects that’s more than just a tale of curiosity, but of real-life science. A planetary nebula is the last breath of a dying star. A globular cluster is an old collection of hundreds of thousands of stars bound together by gravity. I try to show beauty and science in my images.
Nebulae
Clouds of gas and dust — where stars are born, and where they end.
Galaxies
Other island universes, millions of light-years out, each with billions of stars of their own.
Cosmos
Star clusters and the solar system next door — closer to home, still just as strange.