Most teenagers in Mitzpe Ramon go to sleep long before Ron Peretz does. On clear nights, the seventeen-year-old carries a heavy telescope to the edge of the Ramon Crater, sets it up on the rocks and waits for the sky to become completely dark. Then he works until two or three in the morning, photographing galaxies millions of light-years away.
Mitzpe Ramon, a small town in the Negev Desert, is one of the best places in Israel to watch the stars. The air is dry, the town is far from large cities, and efforts have been made to keep its street lights low. On a moonless night, thousands of stars are visible to the naked eye, and the Milky Way stretches across the sky like a river of light.
Ron's interest began when he was nine, when his grandfather gave him a pair of old binoculars. "I pointed them at the moon and saw craters," he says. "I couldn't believe that something so far away was suddenly so close." He saved his pocket money for four years to buy his first small telescope. Since then, he has taught himself to photograph the sky from online videos and books, often through trial and error.
Last winter, Ron's patience paid off. While he was examining a series of photographs of a distant galaxy, he noticed a tiny point of light that did not appear in older pictures. He sent his photos to a professional observatory, and astronomers later confirmed that he had spotted a supernova, the explosion of a dying star. Amateur astronomers around the world discover supernovae every year, but for a teenager working alone in the desert, it was an extraordinary achievement.
Not everything about his hobby is glamorous. Desert nights can be freezing in winter, and Ron has spent many hours waiting for clouds to pass, only to go home without a single good picture. His mother admits that she worried at first. "He was out alone in the dark, near a cliff," she says. "Now I bring him hot tea at midnight."
Ron now guides tourists on weekend stargazing tours. "People come from Tel Aviv and they've never really seen the stars," he says. "When they look up here for the first time, some of them actually cry."