At night, Midtown senior Ether Pilgrim is often awake, configuring his camera to capture hundreds of shots of the night sky. He’s not just taking pictures, he’s exploring beyond the sheet of darkness.

Pilgrim has been involved with astrophotography for as long as he’s owned a camera. For the last few years, photographing and interpreting astronomical phenomena has been his main creative outlet.

“As a kid, I was always into physics and the stars,” Pilgrim said. “One day I was scrolling YouTube and came across astrophotography and thought it could be a good idea. I started with a basic telescope and went from there.”

He said he taught himself by combing the internet for advice, reading forums and learning software alongside telescope add-ons.

“Mostly, it was a lot of searching the internet, Reddit and different forums, learning how it works, how to use software like Adobe Photoshop, and figuring out how to utilize the telescope properly and the add-ons,” Pilgrim said.

He said he uses processing in his photography, where flat star fields turn into images with visible color and structure, revealing nebulae that are otherwise hidden in raw frames.

“I use processing software that looks at a photo and tries to get the image out of it, get the color out,” Pilgrim said. “Before it’s been saturated, it’s just stars; with the software you can saturate color and eventually see the nebulae.”

A mentor, Jack Sullivan, shifted his focus from pictures alone to what those pictures can tell you about the universe, emphasizing data and interpretation.

“Originally, I thought it was just doing math, but [Sullivan] told me it’s a lot more about interpreting data,” Pilgrim said. “A lot of groundbreaking physics comes from looking at black holes and phenomena like neutron stars where you test the laws of physics.”

Sullivan, who describes himself as a former gravitational wave astronomer now working with AI models and infrastructure in industry, connected with Pilgrim on LinkedIn.

“My experience was speaking with him primarily on LinkedIn and helping to guide his passion into action when it came to pursuing research as a high schooler,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan highlighted what stood out to him about Pilgrim’s approach.

“Ether is very intelligent, but he has a lot of the other thing, which is even more important as a physicist: drive,” Sullivan said.

Specifically, Pilgrim ties brightness measurements to distance and change, describing how observation becomes numbers a scientist can use.

“How bright something is can relate to how fast light takes to reach us,” Pilgrim said. “If you look at a possible supernova far away, we measure its brightness and the bright points on the object, and then we turn that into quantifiable data.”

Moreover, the equipment determines how much light you can gather. Pilgrim contrasts the limits of the eye with telescopes designed to collect long exposures for cleaner detail.

“With your eyes, you can’t really saturate a nebula or galaxy out of it,” Pilgrim said. “But there are telescopes built like a camera without a limit on how much light it lets in, so they gather a lot of light and create a more defined image.”

Pilgrim pursued physics foundations through a program and looked for opportunities beyond the U.S., emailing professors and stepping into a temporary teaching role after shadowing.

“It was more about learning the basics of physics and figuring out how that applies,” Pilgrim said. “I emailed around, shadowed a professor and eventually became his temporary teaching assistant.”

Working with personal gear creates real constraints, from trees and long exposures to targets shifting night by night; therefore, Pilgrim says a mistake can cost hours.

“I’m not working with equipment as professional as at universities, so I’m dealing with my own,” Pilgrim said. “Sometimes, I can’t get as many photos as I want, trees block the sky, exposures run long; if I mess up, it can ruin hours, and the object’s angle changes.”

His academic interests circle back to relativity and scale, and to what distant light implies about time and distance.

“I like to study Einstein’s special relativity and general relativity,” Pilgrim said. “They’re important in all physics, and ‘time is relative’ is true when you’re looking at something so far away, and it’s amazing to see and visualize it.”

Support at home made the work possible, given the cost of building a usable setup over time.

“It’s probably my mother; she was with me the whole entire step of the way,” Pilgrim said. “Photography equipment is not cheap, and it’s been an amazing opportunity that she gave me.”

He is looking ahead to radio astronomy and wants to connect with global instruments if college opportunities align.

“I want to go beyond this to radio telescopes, such as the Event Horizon Telescope,” Pilgrim said. “The schools I’m applying to have connections to it, and I hope to work with different telescopes around the world.”