By day, Michael Goh is a bank
manager who dispenses loans and advice to business clients of Bankwest. Come
sunset, his head's turned to the heavens. Here he is on a sand dune at Nambung
National Park, a three-hour drive north of his home in Perth, looking up towards
the centre of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. "It's my version of a selfie,"
laughs the 45-year-old, a father of two teenage girls.
Amazing to think those photons of light from the galactic centre spent 25,000 years streaking across interstellar space at 300,000km per second before smacking into his camera's sensor during this 25-second exposure.
Amazing to think those photons of light from the galactic centre spent 25,000 years streaking across interstellar space at 300,000km per second before smacking into his camera's sensor during this 25-second exposure.
Goh is a
first-generation Aussie - his Malaysian parents migrated in the '60s to escape ethnic
strife in their homeland - and he was a science fiction fan from a young age,
growing up with Star Wars and Star Trek. These days, it's science fact that
tickles his imagination. For the past six years he's been photographing the
night sky.
It's a hobby that expands his horizons: one of his shots recently won a big award and the prize was a visit this month to Chile for a tour of the VLT, the European Southern Observatory's flagship facility. (VLT, btw, stands for Very Large Telescope; lame name or what?) At a spot like Nambung National Park, far from urban light pollution, Goh can see several thousand stars with the naked eye on a clear winter's night, but that's only a tiny fraction of the 100 billion or so stars in the Milky Way.
And the Milky Way itself is only one of at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That's a "humbling and awe-inspiring" thing to contemplate, Goh says; it puts all the problems of the Earth - its wars and woes, its never-ending political crises - into a kind of perspective.
Let's give the last word to Monty Python's Galaxy Song, sung by that great pub philosopher Eric Idle: So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure / How amazingly unlikely is your birth / And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space /'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
