‘I love using my astrophotography to emphasize human connection’
In his photography, graduate student Imran Sultan must overcome several obstacles: subjects that only appear in the middle of the night, the obscuring haze of Chicago’s light pollution and distances that reach thousands of light years.
But, for the second year in a row, his persistence has paid off.
Sultan’s stunningly sharp photo of Heart and Soul Nebulae — two star-forming regions located in the Cassiopeia constellation 7,000 lightyears away — won the 2024 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition in the astronomy category.
“The fact that astronomers looked at these two nebulae and saw a ‘heart’ and a ‘soul’ highlights the human element of astronomy,” said Imran Sultan. Here, he used a telephoto lens to capture the clouds of gas and dust, or nebulae, over three nights.
“I’m thrilled and deeply honored to be selected by the Royal Society for the Astronomy award for a second year in a row,” Sultan said. “My astrophotography has allowed me so many opportunities to make astronomy more accessible to a wider audience. The fact that astronomers looked at these two nebulae and saw a ‘heart’ and a ‘soul’ highlights the human element of astronomy. We can’t help but see a bit of ourselves when we look into the universe, beginning with the earliest humans who found constellations in the stars, and I love using my astrophotography to emphasize that connection.”
Sultan is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, where he studies galaxy formation. He is advised by Claude-André Faucher-Giguère, a professor of physics and astronomy. Both Sultan and Faucher-Giguere are members of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA).
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