Stargazer
After toiling as a machinist in a zinc mine for the entirety of his adult life, Trevor Barry emerged from the subterranean depths of the Australian Outback and started devoting his retirement days to pursuing his true passion: stargazing.
Using spare material, such as a rainwater tank and washing machine parts, he embarked on a 10-year long project to build an observatory in his own backyard, in the mining town of Broken Hill.
When he started he never imagined that ‘Old Mining Trev’, a high-school dropout, would one day be working with the largest space agency in the world, NASA. But in 2008, when his lens captured images of a 7-month long electrical storm on Saturn that eluded NASA's imaging capabilities, that’s exactly what happened.
Today, Trevor is an integral part of a small network of amateur-run observatories that regularly supply data to the world’s space agencies. During the daytime, when he cannot stare at the stars, Trevor competes and volunteers as a greenskeeper at the local lawn bowling club, his other great passion.
