Meet Lowcountry Photographers and a Sailor Guided by the Night Skies

From backyards to blue water, these three locals are stargazers among us, following the light above.

Story by Barry Kaufman
Photography by Lisa Staff

There are few things that have inspired mankind to dream more than the stars. Before our scientific knowledge gave them form, helping us understand that these twinkling lights are actually distant suns, only visible when our own recedes, they were simply magic. Tossed across the heavens, impossibly bright against the backdrop of night, they were our first reminders that we are not the sum total of the universe. There is more beyond your reckoning, these stars promised. 

As we advanced, we followed these stars to voyage outward beyond our own shores. We studied them and discovered the heavenly patterns each follows across the years. We would pierce the veil of our own planet’s gravity, allowing us to come face to face with their celestial designs. 

They have watched over us as we built civilization. And while our electric lights may dull their shine, they will always be there. They will always fascinate us. And as they watch over us, we now introduce three locals who are always watching back.

Reid McCall

This former Bluffton resident uses astrophotography to capture the cosmos from his Mount Pleasant backyard.

Before a star can shine, it must be formed. And there are few greater wonders in the heavens than the birth of a star, gases and dust that swirl through space in vast, colorful forms, coalescing in clouds, pillars and spirals before they collapse into creation.

Reid McCall isn’t just fascinated by these distant miracles. He’s produced photos that let him share that fascination.

“When you’re looking at the Triangulum Galaxy, it’s 60 thousand light-years wide and 3 million light-years away. The light photons hitting my camera took 3 million years to get here”, he said. “When you tell people that, their brain just shuts down. They just can’t understand that size. I’ve had people say, ‘that’s not possible.’”

It is possible, and McCall has the photos to prove it. A dedicated hobbyist, he has been capturing images of distant nebulae for decades, using sophisticated photographic equipment and a healthy dose of patience.

“The picture of the Orion Nebula was my most complex ever. It required over 1,000 images stacked together using PixInsight, which is the same software used by some engineers working on the James Webb and Hubble Telescopes. You end up with a picture made up of about two weeks of data,” he said. “It’s almost like I aimed a camera at it and kept the lens open for 50 hours.”

Swapping out different filters to capture the colors of the various gases within a nebula, he will sit outdoors for multiple nights at a stretch, leaving the exposure open anywhere from five seconds to 10 minutes on each shot. The high-tech mount for the camera is aligned with Polaris, making adjustments throughout the night to keep the nebula in frame. 

Western Veil Nebula, NGC 6960

Size: 35 ly 

Distance:  2,400 ly  

Taken: September 2023 

Telescope: TMB 92ss

The Veil Nebula is supernova remnant from a star that exploded around 10,000 years ago. Like galactic 4th of July fireworks, this target gets a lot of wows. The red and blue hues are made up of light-years-long streams of hydrogen and oxygen gas.

His photos bring these invisible artworks into focus: dazzling shots of nebulae, galaxies, stars and clusters shared on his Instagram (@images.of.space). Shooting from the backyard of his Mount Pleasant home, with occasional forays west for clear shots out in the desert, this “fun little hobby,” as he calls it, began in 2001, when he bought his first scope and camera. 

“I was super disappointed in what came out. I was just getting blurry blobs, and I soon realized the tech to get the photos I wanted was too expensive. So I just did visual astronomy for years,” he said. Fortunately, a client heard about his hobby and offered to sell him some equipment. Even though what he was offering consisted of rare scopes and mounts that go for thousands of dollars, the client was just looking to buy a guitar. A deal was struck, and McCall’s passion for astrophotography began in earnest.

“Today the cost of everything has come way down. What would have cost me tens of thousands of dollars in 2001, you can do now for a few grand. It’s a lot more attainable,” he said.

But it’s worth it. Not just for the photos that McCall is able to capture, but for the sheer inspiration those images impart.

“When I look at my pictures, after I get done with the color and technical part of it, I just stare at it and say, ‘I can’t believe it. I just took a picture of something older than any nation, religion or anything on Earth that we can relate to.’ For me it’s very relaxing. All these problems we think we have, we’re just a blip. We’re just starting to find our place in this galaxy and in this universe. The fact that we even exist at all is a wonderful miracle. Every human is part of this grand celestial dance. The elements that make up our bodies were forged inside stars billions of years ago. We are literally made of stardust, and we can go out at night and gaze back at the starlight. We’re nature standing up and looking at itself.”

How he does it

The extraordinary photos that Reid McCall takes of far-off galaxies and nebulae require more than just a camera and patience. Just because you’re gazing at the stars doesn’t mean you’re immune to the effects of Earth, and he has learned over the years the best way to work with local conditions to capture the best image. 

“You’re always going to get better data if you shoot in the desert, but technically speaking you could shoot a photo of a galaxy in downtown New York,” he said.

That’s not to say it wouldn’t be difficult. Even shooting in Mount Pleasant where he lives, a place that offers far less light pollution than the Big Apple, can be difficult. 

“I have trees everywhere, so a lot of it hinges on how long that object will be clear of the trees,” he said. “Here it’s very humid, so in the summer you get a lot of haze that accentuates light pollution. I prefer to shoot in the winter here because the atmosphere is still and clearer.”

Photo Gallery

From his backyard in Mount Pleasant, photographer Reid McCall has journeyed farther than most travelers ever could; across light-years, through galaxies and into the birthplaces of stars. Using a pair of telescopes (the TMB 92ss and TMB 130ss) and an extraordinary amount of patience, McCall has spent countless nights capturing deep-space objects from the comfort of his own yard.

Elephant Trunk Nebula, IC 1396A Size: 20 ly Distance: 2,400 ly Taken: October 2024 Telescope: TMB 130ss The Elephant Trunk Nebula contains several fascinating star-forming regions, notably the two stars in the circular cavity near the top whose stellar winds have cleared the surrounding dust. The bright outer rim is illuminated and ionized by the massive star HD 206267, located just east of the nebula.

Melotte 15 Size: 15 ly Distance: 7,500 ly Taken: October 2023 Telescope: TMB 92ss Melotte 15 is a unique open star cluster located within the Heart Nebula, companion to the Soul Nebula. In this and similar color-mapped images, the cyan-blue areas represent oxygen gas, while the orange and yellow regions correspond to hydrogen and sulfur gases.

Soul Nebula, IC 1848 Size: 125 ly Distance: 7,000 ly Taken: October 2024 Telescopes: TMB 92ss and TMB 130ss A favorite target to shoot every fall, the Soul Nebula’s intricate dust pillars and active star-forming regions become sharper with each year’s additional data, leading to longer and more detailed integrations over time.

Hercules Cluster, Messier 13 Size: 145 ly Distance: 25,000 ly Taken: September 2024 Telescope: TMB 130ss It’s fascinating to stare at hundreds of thousands of stars concentrated in one region just 145 light-years across. Imagine what your sky might look like if you lived on a planet orbiting one of these suns. Globular clusters are among the oldest features of the universe, dating back 8 to 13 billion years.

Dumbbell Nebula, Messier 27 Size: 1.44 ly, Distance: 1,360 ly Taken: September 2024 Telescope: TMB 130ss The Dumbbell Nebula formed during the final stages of a Sun-like star’s life, when it expelled its outer layers after running out of fuel. The star expanded into a red giant before its core collapsed, ejecting its atmosphere into space. The resulting cloud glows with light from the remaining white dwarf at its center.

Triangulum Galaxy, Messier 33 Size: 60,000 ly Distance: 3,000,000 ly Taken: December 2024 Telescope: TMB 130ss Photographing another galaxy is always awe-inspiring. The pink and red regions are immense nebulae, much like the targets we capture within our own galaxy. M33 is the third-largest galaxy in our Local Group, behind the Milky Way and Andromeda.

Great Orion Nebula, Messier 42 Size: 24 ly Distance: 1,344 ly Taken: January 2025 Telescope: TMB 130ss This is the most complex image I’ve produced, both in acquisition and processing. A total of 1,170 individual images (subs) with exposures ranging from five seconds to three minutes were captured from my backyard over two weeks. I spent another two weeks processing the subs into this final image.

Rosette Nebula, NGC 2237 Size: 130 ly Distance: 5,200 ly Taken: September 2024 Telescope: TMB 130ss The Rosette is special to me because it was the first target I used to learn PixInsight, the software I still use to process astrophotography images. I’ll never forget the first time I saw it appear on my computer screen — my jaw dropped, realizing it was possible to capture something so incredible from a backyard.

Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635 Size: 7 ly Distance: 7,100 ly Taken: October 2024 Telescope: TMB 130ss This image is the result of 50 hours of exposures, needed to tease out faint details in the bubble’s delicate structure. One of the most striking nebulae in the sky, the distinctive “bubble” is formed by the powerful stellar winds of a massive central star.

Zach Grether

This aerospace engineer finds art and advocacy in the Lowcountry’s night skies.

When you’re taking the kind of ethereally gorgeous nightscape photos that Zach Grether takes, you approach the shot with a mix of right-brain creativity and left-brain technical prowess. You take stock of your camera’s settings and accessories, perfectly calibrating each to the amount of light and the desired shot. You cast your eyes upward, pairing the composition of the surrounding landscape with whatever hidden details may reveal themselves in the sky when you’re done. 

Or, as he puts it simply:

“There’s a lot of just positioning yourself in the universe and figuring out what the sky is going to look like,” he said.

That zen-like simplicity masks an immensely deep level of photographic knowledge. An aerospace engineer by trade, he still looks at his photography as more of an enriching hobby than anything else, but with the sort of technical perspective only an engineer could have.

“My wife got me my first camera when we were living out west, just your basic starter kit from Costco, but the next thing I knew, I was buying lenses left and right and absorbing everything I could. As an engineer, I really needed to understand the manual side of cameras, and it just became a beast. I couldn’t stop eating,” he said. His growing photographic obsession soon found its muse. “As an aerospace engineer, and just a kid that loved space in general, I was kind of drawn to the stars out west. It just takes an hour or so to get outside of the lights where you can start to really see what’s out there.”

Practicing his art along forgotten backroads that connect empty towns near the New Mexico-Arizona border was made easier by the famous “dark zones” in the area where light pollution from nearby cities is essentially nonexistent. 

“You pull over and turn the car off, and you let all the lights settle and give your eyes a few minutes to kind of adjust, and get out. You look up, and it’s just like, it’s indescribable,” he said. “I am definitely a big advocate for DarkSky International and what they do. I really wish there were more dark sky areas. There’s all the stuff that, for some reason, we feel like we need to light up. It really does affect bird migration and turtles and everything else.”

And it makes it far more difficult to take the photos Zach takes. But then, the engineer in him seems to relish the challenge. One of his most famous shots, which wound up going viral when SpaceX got wind of it, actually captured one of the aerospace giant’s rockets streaking across the Hunting Island sky and through the silhouette of a beached tree’s branches. Writing about it for PetaPixel, Grether went deep into the process of capturing it. Gathering data for an ISO invariance test, the ISO 6400 on his old Sony a7III would look different than it would on his newer Canon 5D Mark II. Setting the time-lapse app to shoot 30 one-second exposures each. Then, noticing the streak of the rocket across the sky, improvising to capture a five-minute time lapse of its arc through the heavens.

“There’s just being out there and just getting lucky a lot of times, but there’s a lot of work involved,” he said. “There was a Reddit comment on a story about that shot where someone said, ‘Thank God someone knew what they were doing when they were out there.’ Thank you. I didn’t respond to it, but that’s the best comment I’ve ever gotten.”

How he does it

There is far more technical wizardry that goes into Zach Grether’s awe-inspiring photos of the night sky than we could possibly fit into one story. But he’s happy to at least share what goes into each photo.

“It’s a combination of things. It’s definitely a problem that you have to solve. You’ve got to know what kind of star you want. You want to show star trails? Do you just want to show points of light? Do you want to show the Milky Way? What time of year is it? Because that’s going to decide where the Milky Way is in the sky, or whether or not you have the moon washing the sky out. And then as a night-scape photographer, you need to have some sort of landscape to incorporate into the image. So just getting somewhere unique and having that line of sight with the sky, and having everything lined up correctly is the second part of it, and that’s just kind of creating the image in your head,” he said. “The execution is definitely the harder part. It’s a combination of figuring out how to get everything in focus properly. How do you manage your gear’s capabilities? How do you make sure that the stars are stars and not trails? There’s quite a bit to it. But once you actually understand the problems that you have and how the camera works, the components that are involved, it becomes really easy. Especially, once you start doing it a couple of times.”

There’s more to it, but those interested in learning more can find the story he wrote about his SpaceX photo on PetaPixel.

Photo Gallery

Zach Grether has always been drawn to the night. As an aerospace engineer, it’s no surprise that his curiosity about what lies beyond our atmosphere extends naturally to the stars themselves. He received his first DSLR camera as a birthday gift in 2011, and within four years his night-scape photography had earned national attention. His work has been featured by the Oprah Winfrey Network and The Sun Magazine, and one of his images was named among National Geographic’s Best Night Sky Pictures of 2013. Realizing that most Americans live in light-polluted areas where the Milky Way is often invisible, Grether began capturing the night skies around his Arizona home. The resulting images from his time out west reveal a mastery of light, patience and perspective, proving that even from Earth, the cosmos is within reach.

A Canyon Lake Morning Canyon Lake, Arizona My first major nightscape project was a 12-image panorama and actually my second attempt at capturing something unique at the lake. I had gone out there the previous month and knew there was something special. I just needed to step back about 20 feet to capture more of it.

Galactic Rainbow Magdalena, New Mexico I had been shooting nightscapes for a few months, practicing my craft, when I had to take a business trip to Albuquerque. I decided to drive through the night and stop in one of the darkest places in the United States to see what I could capture. The interesting part of this night is that it became one of the most active nights for aurora activity in years, with visibility all the way down to where I was. When I saw red in my camera preview, I actually thought my sensor was broken, so I packed up and kept driving. It wasn’t until I got close enough to Albuquerque to regain cell service that I started getting messages asking if I knew about the solar storm.

Bridging Earth and Sky Roosevelt Lake, Arizona I’ve always had an affinity for images with strong leading lines such as roads, paths and bridges. I had been out shooting all night, driving farther and farther away from the Phoenix city lights, stopping to photograph something, then driving some more. Just as I was about to turn around, I saw the bridge in the distance and instantly knew what I wanted to do. Luckily, at 3:30 a.m., there was zero traffic, and I was able to time it perfectly.

The Jail Salt River Canyon, Arizona I had been working on improving my light-painting skills when, while driving through the canyon on a photo expedition, I remembered a small derelict shack up on a bluff. I had only seen it briefly from a distance but decided to stop and see what I could create. It ended up being a series of stacked images that brought out different details of an otherwise ordinary little shack. Using just a headlamp, I lightly painted the outside in one image, used higher-intensity orange light to create a candlelit effect inside, and finished with a normal capture of the night sky.

Roy Prescott IV

This Hilton Head native blends modern seamanship with a centuries-old method written in the stars

Last month Roy Prescott IV found himself 100 miles offshore at the helm of a 38-meter Westport yacht with a massive lightning storm moving in. 

“We were trying to make it ashore before it hit, but we wound up right in it. There were huge bolts of lightning striking all around the ship. You drive this boat with a computer screen – it’s very tech-forward – and if we’d been unlucky enough to take a hit, we’d have been grounded,” he said. “That can happen, where you get hit and it works its way off land. If you’re offshore and can’t see land and all of your electronics are out, it isn’t pretty.”

Fortunately, Prescott had one thing going for him. Even if the storm took his GPS, his electronics and all the modern navigational trappings the boat holds, he’d simply need a glance at the night sky to know exactly where he is. One of the few captains who still uses celestial navigation, he has been a dedicated disciple of an art form that’s as old as sailing itself.

A seasoned sailor and native of Hilton Head, his love of the sea would take him offshore in 2013 as he began working on boats up in the Great Lakes. He’s built his career jumping from one boat to the next, from 50-ton passenger yachts up to 1,600-ton ships. A few years ago, while serving as first mate on a yacht owned by “someone on the Forbes list,” he was given leave to further his education.

“I ended up securing approval for testing for a 1,600 ton master license, which is a pretty rigorous examination. It was a couple of years of learning navigation, ship stability, domestic and international maritime law, but celestial navigation was my favorite part because I’d heard about it my whole career,” he said. “It’s a lot of trigonometry, to be honest. I never thought I’d have the opportunity to drive multi-million-dollar yachts by being good at math.”

Latching onto a book that he calls his bible, Nathaniel Bowditch’s “American Practical Navigator,” he dove into the ancient art of allowing the stars to guide you. 

“Bowditch was an early navigator from Salem, Massachusetts. It’s amazing the amount of knowledge in this book,” he said. “Using Bowditch, you can figure out the lines of your position using these graphs and find your distance. That’s my favorite part of using the sextant, just knowing this one tool in my hand can help me figure out wherever I am on Earth.”

How he does it

Roy Prescott IV is one of very few captains who can still navigate by the stars. It’s an art form that began with the earliest sailors, and one that came very close to being forgotten.

“The United States Naval Academy had decided at one point cancel celestial studies because it was so outdated. You can use GPS now, and you have all these high-tech systems, right? But someone thankfully realized they were putting all these cadets out into open ocean, and if the satellites get taken down, what happens?” he said. “So they’ve implemented that program again, and it’s taken hold.”

Because of this unique knowledge, he has become an in-demand captain with a list of clients he absolutely cannot discuss due to non-disclosure agreements. But you can guess that, whoever they are, they like to take full advantage of their craft.

“People who buy yachts don’t buy them to stay in one place,” he said. “I’ve done the Mediterranean, Spain, Gibraltar, the Canary Islands. I’ve done all the islands in the Caribbean, the west coast of Florida and into the Keys, up the Intracoastal into Cape May. I piloted the second-largest motor yacht to ever transit the Erie Canal. That trip took two weeks.”

He’d tell us more, but legally he can’t. 

“I’m on an NDA right now. That’s part of the job. I wish I could post about the places I go on Facebook, but I’m not allowed,” he said. “I’ll just say that I’m really happy with what I do.”