Babak Tafreshi has stargazed everywhere from the Himalayas to the Sahara, yet one view trumps them all: his first look at the moon through a telescope, from atop his family’s Tehran apartment in 1991. “I’ll remember that scene forever,” he says. Since then, Tafreshi has been captivated by the idea that “we all share the same sky.” After editing Nojum, the first astronomy magazine in the Middle East, he founded the World at Night project, which recruits photographers worldwide to shoot the night sky behind famous landmarks and publishes the results online.
How did you come up with the world at night project? As a teenager, I saw Pale Blue Dot, a photo of Earth taken by Voyager I that led astronomer Carl Sagan to reflect on the insignificance of man in the universe. The image showed us all on a single planet, and I realized how fascinating it would ...
