Skip to content

Babak Tafreshi | Photojournalist | Speaker

National Geographic photographer, science journalist, founder of The World at Night (TWAN), preserving natural night skies, bridging art & science

Payment Page

Payment to Babak Tafreshi Photography

Share this:

Twitter
Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

Menu

About
Talks & Workshops
Fine Art Prints
Book
- Photo Books
Contact

Search for:

Follow

Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube

New Posts

Post #1000. Five years ago in Jan 2016 I started posting here, after a meeting in the annual @NatGeo Seminars in DC. At the time I was much against joining Instagram and spending time on any new social media. The ideas shared by @alicebrkeating @joelsartore and other National Geographic colleagues that day revealed to me the growing potentials of this platform for visual storrytelling. I tried to combine my background of science journalism and astronomy with the art and joy of night sky photography in the posts. From stories that bridges art and science, Earth & sky, to those that reveal the many values of preserving natural night-time environment of our planet, against light pollution. Some of the images were fresh from the camera and some stories were from the earlier years in Iran when I found this passion in 1990s, and when The World at Night project @twanight formed in the 2000s.

Mars on Earth. Night panorama of the extremely dry environment of Chile’s Atacama Desert, lit by the rising moon. Photographed in 2016. The silence of desert is amazing, breaks only by wind whispers. Turn on the sound high. What you hear is the first ever recorded sound from Mars, which I added to my Atacama panorama. This is recorded by the new @nasa rover Perseverance that landed last week. Swipe to see the first 360 panorama from the rover surrounding. This place was once an ancient lake, 3.5 billion years ago, when Mars was wet and perhaps habitable. Slide 3 is another panorama projection, which I created from from the NASA image to better show the rover itself. If you have not tried it yet, @natgeo and NASA created a neat Instagram story filter where you look around this panorama and place yourself in it for a selfie with Perse on Mars! Check mine on slide 4. NatGeo March 2021 magazine features a well-done cover story on Mars exploration.

“Ribbons”. There are various shapes of aurora depending on the geomagnetic activity, from waves, curtains, bands, to swirls and magnificent crowns. This was a midnight of Sep 2019 during my annual Aurora PhotoTour. The rising moon did not vanish the bright displsay of aurora borealis, near a village in northern Iceland. Stars of Orion are on the horizon.

Text & image from my book “The World at Night”. Tap the link in my bio to learn more.

Mars glows in red in the sky of our paradise planet. A bit closer to the sun, makes Venus a true hell, and a bit further away from our safe haven is the cold, dusty, and arid Mars with thin atmosphere. But still simple microbic life may survive under its surface and could be thriving in the early Solar System history when Mars had oceans and proper atmosphere. Today we are one step closer to find out as @nasa new Mars Rover landed successfully, an astrobiologist robot will look for signs of ancient life. Swipe to see the first two images taken by its Hazard Avoidance Cameras. I enhanced the raw files for more clarity. Soon highres color photos will be taken daily of the surrounding, the basin of a large meteorite crater that scientists believe it was once flooded with water and was home to an ancient river delta, more than 3 billion years ago.

Road to an astronomer’s paradise. Gently illuminated with dim yellow light to keep the natural darkness of this remote part of Atacama Desert in Chile, the road crawls upward to the 2600-meter high summit of Cerro Paranal, where I’m standing. This is home to the Very Large Telescope (VLT), one of the world’s leading observatories by @esoastronomy. In the sky of this single-exposure photograph the galactic core is rising in a truly stunning dark starry night. From a 2016 assignment to this dry barren “paradise”.

Like an elegant flower bouquet for your Valentine’s Day, this tiny ice frost on our kitchen window sparkles in moonlight, through my Macro lens. The recent full moon night that was pretty cold here in New England. #ice #fullmoon #valentines @twanight

Mars sets above Sierra Nevada, a few years ago in California. We are in a remarkable month in the history of space exploration where the Red Planet is visited by spacecrafts from three different countries at the same time. The Hope craft launched by UAE, the first interplanetary mission by an Arab nation, has successfully entered the orbit to study the Martian atmosphere from above. Tianwen-1 from China has also arrived safely to the orbit and aims to soft-land a rover on Mars in May. The last one to arrive, and the most sophisticated, is NASA’s Mars 2020 mission with an astrobiologist robot called Perseverance that lands on Feb 18 at 3:55 pm ET. The one-ton two-meter rover will look for signs of possible ancient Martian life (fossils of bacteria). It also aims to launch a drone helicopter on March 19 to scout targets and test the many challenges of flying in the very thin dusty and cold Martian atmosphere. @nasajpl @firouz_michael_naderi @tweetsoutloud @twanight #mars

Instagram
Twitter
Facebook
Vimeo

A WordPress.com Website.

Add your thoughts here... (optional) Post to

Cancel

Email

Name

Website

Loading Comments...

Comment

×

%d bloggers like this: