From Drombeg Stone Circle to the Smithsonian

On 26 March 2020, I photographed the International Space Station passing above Drombeg Stone Circle near Glandore in West Cork. In the same frame were Venus, the familiar constellation of Orion, and a stone circle that had stood beneath those skies for thousands of years.

Three years later, that photograph went on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

My image of the International Space Station (the print in the lower left with the purple hue above Drombeg Stone Circle) on display on the walls of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. 

It was a journey I certainly hadn’t imagined when I took it.

The photograph was captured just before the first Covid lockdown brought life as we knew it to a halt. Looking back, that timing gives it another layer of significance. But it was the relationship between the ancient monument and the modern spacecraft that would eventually catch the attention of the Smithsonian’s curators.

In 2022, an email arrived out of the blue asking whether they could include the image in an upcoming exhibition about light pollution.

The exhibition was Lights Out: Recovering Our Night Sky. My photograph would be one of 100 images helping to tell the story of our relationship with darkness, and what we stand to lose as artificial light makes the stars harder to see.

The curators explained that they were drawn to the photograph for two reasons. It showed the beauty of a rural night sky, but it also brought together two objects built by humans roughly 3,000 years apart: Drombeg Stone Circle and the International Space Station.

One rooted in the West Cork landscape. The other travelling high above it in the silence of space.

That connection gave a photograph taken in a familiar corner of home a place in a much wider story.

The exhibition opened in March 2023. My image was displayed as a 28-by-18-inch print, with copies also included in a travelling version of the exhibition for venues across the United States.

There was a lovely connection between those parts of my life, too. It brought together photography, astronomy and a place in Cork, all within an exhibition asking people to look more closely at the sky above them.

Holding a limited edition print of the Drombeg image, which can be ordered here.

Lights Out explored how light pollution affects life on Earth, from wildlife and ecosystems to our cultures and our ability to see the stars. The night sky was the subject, but the exhibition’s message reached well beyond astronomy.

A dark sky is something we can easily take for granted until we no longer have it.

In June 2023, I travelled to Washington D.C. with a friend and got to see the photograph on display for myself. Knowing it was part of the exhibition was one thing. Standing in the Smithsonian and seeing it on the wall was something else entirely.

But one of the most special moments connected to the photograph came from much closer to home not long after.

A former teacher of mine at CBC Cork told me that, during a school tour to Washington, he had brought pupils from my former school to see my image as part of the exhibition while sightseeing in D.C. Only a few years earlier, I had been a pupil at the same school. Now, a group of students from CBC were standing in the Smithsonian looking at a photograph I had taken in West Cork.

As amazing as it was to see the image there myself, hearing that meant even more.

When I took the photograph at Drombeg in March 2020, I couldn’t have imagined where it would end up, or who would stop to look at it. From a night beneath the stars in West Cork to a museum wall in Washington, and then back to a conversation with a former teacher, it has taken on a story far beyond the moment I pressed the shutter.

The image and the rest of the Lights Out exhibit will be on display until December 2026.