Hi, I’m Sara
UX/Software designer by day, astrophotographer by night
That’s right, I have a day job
I have a BFA from Ringling College of Art & Design, where I studied Graphic & Interactive Communication. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that while I did take some photography courses during college, I did not complete my minor in photography. At any rate, I wound up in Austin, TX after graduating and began a career in interactive design. A lot has changed for design jobs since I first entered the workforce in 2006 - I’m currently earning a living as a User Experience Designer of software products.
How I fell in love with dark skies
It started in the Midwest, but snuck back up on me in Marfa
I had a moderate interest in astronomy as a kid. My mom liked to have “deck nights” when the weather was nice, where we would “camp out” (meaning, lots of sleeping bags and snacks) on the deck and watch the skies.
My parents house is pretty much set back into the woods, the trees were much shorter then, but we lived in a rural enough area that we could see the Milky Way from the front yard when it was high in the sky.
The moment that forever sparked my curiosity in space was when my mom corralled us all out into the driveway to look at the sky for an ISS passing. This was not a normal ISS pass, there was another light trailing behind it. It was the first time that I realized that, “Wow! There are actual people up there!”.
The light trailing behind it was something that would be docking with the ISS. I don’t recall the event, but would have been in the late 1990s or very early 2000s. We went out to watch another pass and the trailing light was closer to the ISS. Then, the next night, there was just one really bright light transiting the sky. I was in awe.
To foster my interest in the night sky, my parents gifted me a Meade ETX90 telescope one year for Christmas while I was in high school. I never got skilled with operating it at the time, but I did hang on to it and still use it today.
First picture I took through my Meade ETX90. The telescope is from the 1990s, but I did not try to image with it until November 2007.
Fast forward a few years, I went off to college, and moved to cities with increasingly far worse light pollution compared to home. Then one day in Austin in 2015, having after work drinks and dinner at Contigo with some girlfriends I worked with at Dell, they proposed the idea of taking a road trip to Marfa. I had been living in Texas for nearly a decade, and had heard of Marfa, but had never been there or looked into it.
My pre-trip research piqued my interest in potential stargazing and night photography opportunities in West Texas. I didn’t remember much about the night sky by this time, or long exposure photography, but I borrowed a Canon DSLR and tripod with the intention of shooting some night time landscapes.
First time out photographing the stars. From the alley behind Cochineal, March 26, 2015. Taken with some kind of Canon DSLR and a 50mm lens.
Those images were less than mediocre, but I just loved it out there. The landscape, the climate, the dark skies. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was looking at in the sky, but it sparked a drive in me to lean into this as a hobby and learn to produce some killer astro photos while exploring deserts and dark sky areas.
Some years, I’ve made more progress honing my skills and exploring than others. The COVID pandemic and more extreme weather in Texas really wrecked my motivation and technical progress in recent years. But I’ve found some renewed motivation and inspiration, have been improving my planning, and am looking forward to some more photography-focused travels this year.
