Bullhorn
a stellar line-up
Bulletin Awards News 1: Thomas Butler, singled out by Creative Review for his photo-reportage of Irish boxer Katie Taylor
Bulletin Awards News 2: Robert Tighe won a New Zealand National Sports Journalism award for his profiles, including one of diver William Trubridge
‘Getting away from it all’ is a mantra for the masses. Enough of this urban sprawl! An end to concrete Babylon! Give me freedom. Give me space. Give me… the Atacama Desert. This lonely, desiccated sandscape is an unlikely place to find heaven on earth, yet for a group of uniquely dedicated astronomers, it is exactly that. It is, indeed, a place to find the Heavens on Earth; a place where they can sit, undisturbed, in near silence, with little more than the humming of a few million electrical circuits to disturb their endless gaze into the skies, where they are looking, hoping to find life on other planets. For those who have chosen (were chosen?) to dedicate their working lives to the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere and its brilliantly literal Very Large Telescopes, the sacrifices are many: isolation, bizarre work patterns, the potentially futile nature of their quest… but so, too, are the rewards. How many of us, after all, can start a shift with the prospect – who knows? – of discovering a planet, or, even, a new life form, staring back at us from beyond our own solar system? As you can read (page 28), none of the remarkable individuals stationed at the ESO would ever consider changing their working lives for another, although one or two of us with lives more ordinary might well consider trading places. As might, even, a man with an apparently gilded existence such as Hollywood’s favourite ‘alternative mainstream’ movie icon, Johnny Depp. As he tells us this month (page 44), such are the pressures of fame, of the celebrity ‘bubble’ in which he rather reluctantly dwells, he routinely has to escape the cameras which are forever trained on his famous face, in order to find sanity and sanctuary with his family. Depp, who is these days one of the most bankable screen icons, has the luxury of his own, private island to retire to when ‘it all gets too much’ – a privilege afforded to only the most fortunate. As for the rest of us… well, to misquote Oscar Wilde, we may be lying in the gutter, but there’s nothing to stop us staring at the stars.
Cover Illustration: Von
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