Joshua Copen

Joshua's fascination with the stars began in the third grade, with an astronomy book he found and never quite put down. The science pulled at him first — how a cloud of gas collapses into a star, how light travels across distances too large to keep in your head — and the photography followed.

Today he photographs galaxies, nebulae, star clusters and the Moon from his own backyard in Grants Pass, Oregon, under Bortle 3/4 dark skies. Deep-sky imaging rewards patience: a single finished image often represents ten or more hours of exposure, collected over multiple nights as the Earth turns and the atmosphere settles. His image of the Great Nebula in Orion alone took fourteen hours.

The work is slow, quiet, and precise — and that is the point. Each frame is a long conversation between a backyard telescope, a camera sensor, and light that left its source long before any of us were watching.