Article written by Miguel Tsang for The Daily Northwestern.
At a time where many distracted themselves by looking down, maybe at a screen or a new bread recipe, fifth-year physics graduate student Imran Sultan’s family decided to try looking up.
“In the early months of the pandemic, I was staying with my family, and we decided to get a telescope,” Sultan said. “As soon as I had looked at (the stars) with my own eyes, I wanted to capture them and share them with everyone I knew.”
Photography quickly became his favorite pandemic hobby, Sultan said, spurring him to purchase his first camera — a Canon DSLR. This decision nicely tied into his graduate research on cosmology, which he was just beginning at the time.
Sultan captures the April 2024 solar eclipse.
Now, Sultan is a two-time winner of The Royal Society Publishing Photography Contest, with both of his winning photos in the astronomy category. His most recent win was announced on Dec. 4.
Even after his back-to-back wins, Sultan isn’t slowing down. His picture of last Monday’s lunar occultation of Mars was featured on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website.
Until now, Sultan had little photography experience outside of a camera he was gifted as a kid. One thing Sultan learned as he taught himself photography is that capturing the stars is a much bigger task than snapping a picture of the sky on a Polaroid.
In a city like Chicago, lights can accumulate to create light pollution, which takes the spotlight from celestial sights. As he pursued his graduate research, Sultan learned the hard way that light pollution and nighttime photography don’t mix.
“It’s best to drive two hours out of the city to see the sky,” Sultan said. “My earliest memory (with photography) is driving out there and seeing more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Sultan described light pollution as a “dome” due to the shape it forms around its origin city when viewed from a distance. Everything from skyscrapers to streetlights can contribute to the contamination, he said.
To counter light pollution’s effects, there are many tricks photographers can use, Sultan said. One of his personal favorites is to put his camera’s filter to work.
“The big advantage of filters is that I don’t have to drive three hours outside Evanston to do my photography,” Sultan said. “That’s really a game changer.”
Filters come in handy when photographing a nebula, a cloud of dust and gas. Because nebulae emit specific wavelengths of light, camera filters are able to pick up on those to help them pop.
Sultan’s photograph of twin emission nebulae won him the Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition in the astronomy category in 2024.
He described one nebula as being heart-shaped, leading astronomers to dub its twin the “soul” nebula. Sultan said the warm red and blue wavelengths emitted by the nebulae add to their human qualities like hearts and souls.
Continue to the full Daily Northwestern article.