“I saw the rings of Saturn last night,” he told his coworkers. “Oh, yeah, we see Pluto every night, too!” they ribbed. These General Motors employees didn’t know their good-natured taunts would encourage John Chumack but, “I took a picture to prove what I saw,” Chumack said, and the rest, you could say, was written in the stars.

At age seven, Chumack would watch the night sky and long for a telescope. It wasn’t until years later that this electrical engineer could afford to indulge and buy a telescope. Before Chumack knew it he was taking pictures of the solar system.

But Venus, Mars, and the moon weren’t enough. “I needed more light to take pictures of deep space,” he says, but this required a large and expensive telescope. Chumack decided to build his own. “I’d been married about a year and my wife threatened to divorce me because of my project,” Chumack laughs. “Pieces of my telescope were scattered around the living room because I built it in sections.” Six months later, he made his way to the porch of his city apartment, but it wasn’t the traffic lights and smog that got in the way. Instead, an elderly neighbor called the police because, “a guy on the hill has a big cannon.” Thankfully, the cops thought Chumack’s “weapon” was rather clever.

A resident of Dayton, Ohio, Chumack is an astrophotographer. This unique art requires up to nine hours of patience for just one photo. “If you have to go to the bathroom,” Chumack says, “that’s the end of your picture.” He stays with his camera and makes corrections to its positioning every few seconds. In the beginning, only a small percentage of his shots were successful. “Now I get 98% of my shots,” he says. “That other two percent is because of satellites or planes,” he says, an interruption that can’t be discovered until the darkroom stage. One can only hope these pictures weren’t taken during a nine-hour shoot.

With over 35,000 images to his name, it’s likely you’ve seen Chumack’s pictures of our infinite universe. His work has been featured in hundreds of places including: science and astronomy books; Capital One credit cards; and major publications like National Geographic, Time (front cover), Science, Discover, Newsweek, Sky & Telescope, and almost monthly in Astronomy. His art is available in 21 countries around the world and he owns five observatories that are official facilities for conducting astronomical research.

“I shoot every clear night,” Chumack says. Whether it’s five below zero or 80 degrees, you can bet Chumack’s out there somewhere, capturing the cosmos. Join him and the Seven Sisters at the show, have a Milky Way, and enjoy the moon and stars.