The World at Night founder and leader, Babak Tafreshi is an award-winning photographer working with National Geographic, Sky & Telescope magazine and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Babak is also a freelance science journalist and astronomy communicator using all media. Born in 1978 in Tehran, he is based in Boston, United States, but could be anywhere on the planet, from the Sahara to the Himalayas or Antarctica. He is a board member of Astronomers Without Borders, an international organization designed to bridge between cultures and connect people around the world through their common interest in astronomy. He received the 2009 Lennart Nilsson Award, the world’s most recognized award for scientific photography, for his global contribution to night sky photography. Since TWAN was designated as the first Special Project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, Tafreshi cooperated with the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO as a project coordinator for IYA2009.
As a science journalist he has contributed to many television and radio programmes on astronomy and has interviewed world-renowned astronomers and space scientists. When living in Iran he was editor of the Persian astronomy magazine Nojum for a decade and has been a board member of the Astronomical Society of Iran’s outreach committee where he directed many national astronomy events.
Babak started photographing the night sky above natural landscapes and historic architecture in the early 1990s, when he was a teenager. He has always been fascinated by the universality of the night sky; the same sky appearing above different landmarks of the world. He connects with the world-wide astronomy community through science journalism and his presentations and educational workshops. Photography, science stories and eclipse-chasing have taken him to all of the continents.
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