Above ground, looking up

For Australian Geographic Magazine, 2024.

After spending his entire adult life working as a machinist in a zinc mine,
Trevor Barry surfaced from the depths of the Australian Outback and began using his retirement to chase his true passion: stargazing.

He spent the next ten years in the backyard of his home in the mining town of Broken Hill, building a homemade observatory using whatever materials he could find, including a water tank and washing-machine parts.

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, his homemade setup captured images of a months-long electrical storm on Saturn that NASA’s own cameras missed.

Since then, Trevor has become part of a very small network of amateur observatories that routinely feed data to space agencies around the world. During the daytime, when he can’t look at the stars, you’ll find him at the local lawn bowling club, his second great passion.