Starman

STORY BY WARREN BATES * PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN MOWBRAY

Give John Mowbray a camera and a cloudless night, and the universe is the limit. He might go to Nevada's Red Rock Canyon, Echo Bay, or Lee Canyon, or the crest of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. He'll pull out his tripods, telescope, Canons, and his patience. And with a little help from the weather, he'll vividly capture unique events of the cosmos.

At least those that are visible from Earth. "It's my therapy," says Mowbray, a Las Vegas attorney by day and astrophotographer by night.

Mowbray's therapy has its root in a 1962 Boy Scout outing at Calico Basin in Red Rock Canyon. The troop was studying star systems, but as the moon was getting ready to set the sky became a carpet of black. "There were so many stars out, I lost all definition of the constellations," Mowbray recalls.

The event, at age 11, was the alpha stage for Mowbray's interest in all things celestial. He soon began building model rockets, securing a camera during launch to take time-delayed earthbound shots from above. As a teen, he converted the family bathroom into a film-developing lab.

Mowbray would go on to study government in college, and eventually law. But his interest in the skies never waned. He'd take the odd astronomy elective, or pick up a science magazine off the newsstand. In 1971, he saw Saturn in the night sky for the first time. Twenty years later, he viewed Jupiter and its moons through a telescope and decided he should be as much a chronicler as he was an observer. ...

SEE THE WHOLE STORY AND PHOTOS IN THE Winter 2002 CERCA

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