Heart of the Nation: Somersby, 2250

IT'S amazing how much detail modern digital cameras can capture in the night sky, says amateur astronomer Mike Salway.

IT'S amazing how much detail modern digital cameras can capture in the night sky, says amateur astronomer Mike Salway.

He took this picture of the Milky Way by setting up his Canon 5D on a tripod with a 20-second exposure. He usually likes to get interesting trees or rocks into the foreground when he's shooting the heavens - to give a terrestrial context, "a sense of time and place" - but here he just jumped in for a selfie. He had to stand as still as a statue for the entire exposure, holding his breath, to keep his silhouette sharp.

Salway is pointing to the centre of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, which is shaped like a disc and appears as a band across the sky because we're seeing it side-on. We, and the insignificant little solar system of which we're a part, lie in one of its spiral arms, 27,000 light years from the galactic centre.

The 38-year-old from NSW's Central Coast got into astronomy after his third child was born nine years ago. He'd been spending too much time playing computer shoot-'em-up games, and realised he needed a different hobby. Since discovering astronomy he has "never looked back", though the perennial search for dark skies often means 3am starts on moonless nights, and has taken him as far afield as the Kimberley. What does his wife think? "It's not her thing, but she puts up with it," he says.

Salway, who works for a software firm in Sydney, has two big telescopes at home but prefers to get his fix of the universe these days with the camera. And sometimes, with nothing at all. "The best thing I've ever seen was the total solar eclipse in Cairns last year. We were on the beach and everything went dark, the temperature dropped and the birds stopped tweeting. It was weird, primeval; I'll never forget it. No wonder people hundreds of years ago were petrified."