For five years, photographer Daniel Stephen Homer traveled across four continents to document amateur astronomers, a network of collaborators who have made significant contributions to professional astronomical research. Published by GOST Books in 2024, Route de la Belle Etoile (Route of the Beautiful Star) presents this work in 128 hardback pages. The publisher describes the photographs as blending the domestic and scientific, the mundane and the cosmic, taking the viewer into the world of astronomical citizen science.
Homer photographed amateur astronomers and their observatories in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom. Among those pictured are Canadian Jack Newton, whose efforts to find the progenitor of Type Ib supernova 2010O in Arp 299 earned him time as an investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope, and Dave Gault, who with Australian amateur Peter Nosworthy discovered a moon around the asteroid (17237) 2002 YE25. The book closes with field notes detailing these discoveries and a series of images made from glass plate negatives, hand-annotated by women at the Harvard College Observatory who measured and catalogued stars.
The project documents the night sky’s vastness and the longstanding role of amateurs in filling gaps that professional astronomers could never observe alone. It presents some of the most prolific citizen scientists, whose work forms a structural part of the astronomical record.
