A photojournalist, explorer, and speaker that uses the context of night sky photography to bridge Earth and sky, art and science, and cultures and time. A National Geographic photographer and cinematographer, he lives in Boston with his wife and child.
Babak is also the founder of The World at Night (TWAN) nonprofit program; an elite group of about 40 photographers in 25 countries who present images to reconnect people with importance and beauties of the night sky and to preserve natural night environment (since 2007). He received the 2009 Lennart Nilsson Award, the world’s most recognized award for scientific photography, for his global contribution to night sky photography.
He is a contributor to Sky&Telescope magazine, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), NSF NOIRLab (US national center for ground-based astronomy), International Dark Sky Association (IDA), and several other nonprofit organizations. Photojournalism, science stories, and documenting solar eclipses have taken him to the seven continents, from the heart of Sahara to the Himalayas and Antarctica.
Born in 1978 in Tehran, he lived in Iran until 2011. Babak started night sky photography with natural and historic landmarks in early 1990s in high school. He has always been fascinated by the universality of the night sky; the unifying roof above the symbols of our world. He studied physics and then shifted to science journalism when he appeared on many television and radio programs on astronomy and space exploration. He was the editor of the Persian astronomy magazine (Nojum) for a decade. He was an astronomy teacher in Tehran and involved with various science outreach programs.