Astronomy in Guyana

Pre-colonial: Indigenous Sky Lore

Indigenous nations of the Guianas preserve sky-knowledge in seasonal calendars, origin stories, navigation, ceremony, and ecological observation.

Long before telescopes reached the Guianas, Indigenous nations such as the Lokono (Arawak), Kari'na (Carib), Warao, Akawaio, Arekuna, Patamona, Makushi, Wapichan (Wapishana) and Wai-Wai read the sky as a living calendar. Their astronomy was not separate from daily life: stars announced rains and dry seasons, the ripening of palms, the movement of crabs and turtles, the best moments for hunting and fishing, and the proper times for ceremony. Though their languages and histories differ, many of these traditions share related star stories, evidence of long exchange across coast, savannah, forest, and delta.

The Pleiades stand at the heart of much Guianese sky-lore. Among the Lokono the cluster is Yôkoro wiwa, 'scores of stars', and its first appearance in the east before dawn in June announces the beginning of the Lokono year; among the Kari'na it is Siritjo, 'the stars of the year'. The Makushi called it Ta-mukang, and the Wapichan seasonal calendar names it Wiiinao, 'seven stars'. Around it gather the Hyades, Orion and the Southern Cross in stories of tapirs, a severed leg and the curassow, recorded by Walter Roth. In the Wapichan calendar the Southern Cross is Pawish.

The Lokono preserved a particularly detailed seasonal sky calendar. Constellations called koya, or spirits, were linked to animals and plants: the curassow, jaguar, sea turtle, blue crab, agouti, and awara palm. Each rising in the pre-dawn sky signaled the arrival of a season or the time to gather, hunt, fish, or harvest.

The Warao of the Orinoco delta offer a different but equally rich example. Their celestial tradition is best understood through a vertical cosmos of spirit journeys: Warao shamans reached the sky along a bridge of tobacco smoke, treating with beings who governed health, weather and food.

These traditions are not fragments of folklore beside astronomy; they are astronomy as lived knowledge, joining careful observation to survival, memory, and identity. Some details now survive only in the writings of Walter Roth, Everard im Thurn, later ethnoastronomers, and the testimony of Indigenous elders. What remains is enough to show that Guyana's astronomical history begins not with colonial instruments, but with peoples who had already watched the sky for generations and made it part of the order of the world.

Sources: Walter E. Roth 1915, An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-lore of the Guiana Indians; Everard im Thurn 1883, Among the Indians of Guiana; Richard Schomburgk 1848, Reisen in Britisch-Guiana; Edmundo Magaña and Fabiola Jara 1982, "The Carib sky"; Johannes Wilbert 1972, "Tobacco and shamanistic ecstasy among the Warao Indians of Venezuela"; Konrad Rybka 2018, Lokono sky culture; Rodríguez, Albert, La Rose and Sharpe 2011, the Wapichan seasonal calendar for the South Rupununi District Toshaos Councils.

1840s-1850s: Georgetown Astronomical & Meteorological Observatory

A documented Government Astronomical and Meteorological Observatory in Georgetown records weather and time for a colonial port city.

By the 1840s, Georgetown possessed a working Government Astronomical and Meteorological Observatory. Its keeper, Patrick Sandeman, compiled a decade of daily observations published in 1857 as tables of meteorological elements from the Observatory at Georgetown, Demerara, British Guiana. The record places the site among the earliest documented institutional astronomy and meteorology efforts in what is now Guyana, earlier than later directory references alone suggest.

The observatory grew out of the same colonial scientific world that produced the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana, the museum, and the botanical gardens. In a low-lying sugar colony dependent on drainage, shipping, and seasonal weather, measurements of rainfall, pressure, and temperature were not abstract pursuits. They were tools for commerce, agriculture, public works, and safety.

Accurate time was equally practical. Nineteenth-century port cities used official time signals so ship captains could correct their chronometers, the instruments on which longitude at sea depended. A time ball is recorded at the Georgetown Post Office flagstaff, fitting the wider British maritime pattern of dropping a visible signal at a fixed hour. The specific relationship between the time ball and the observatory building remains to be confirmed, but together they show how astronomy, weather, and navigation were linked in colonial Georgetown.

Several details remain unresolved. The available record does not place British Guiana in the famous British Magnetic Crusade observatory network, and no verified description of a dome or transit instrument has surfaced. What is secure is stronger and more useful: Georgetown had a named Government Astronomical and Meteorological Observatory, a keeper remembered in Sandeman Place, and a surviving data series now valuable to climate historians.

The institution marks a transition in Guyana's sky history: from Indigenous seasonal astronomy to an instrumented colonial science of clocks, weather, and maritime order. It was not yet public astronomy, but it left a documentary footprint in the scientific record.

1910s: Halley's Comet, 1910: An Arawak Name Recorded

Halley's 1910 return reaches British Guiana through global comet panic, colonial newspapers, and a recorded Pomeroon Arawak name.

The 1910 return of Halley's Comet was one of the first truly global media events in astronomy. Recovered photographically in 1909, the comet reached perihelion in April 1910 and became the subject of both wonder and fear. Spectroscopic reports of cyanogen in the tail sparked sensational claims that Earth's passage through the comet's tail might poison the atmosphere. The night of 18-19 May passed harmlessly, but the panic showed how quickly astronomical science could become popular drama.

The year was made more confusing by another visitor: the Great Daylight Comet of January 1910, a separate object so bright it outshone Venus and was seen in daylight. Many later memories of seeing Halley in 1910 were probably memories of that brighter comet. That makes the British Guiana record especially valuable, because it names Halley specifically rather than relying on vague recollection.

Walter E. Roth recorded that the Pomeroon Arawaks spoke of the year's Halley's Comet as Wiwa-kihi-koro, literally star-tail-with. This is not a telescope log or an observatory plate, but it is a concrete local record: an Indigenous Guianese name for the most famous periodic comet, captured in the year of its return.

Through Halley, British Guiana was connected to the same sky story being followed in newspapers and observatories around the world. The comet was watched from colonial ports, Indigenous river districts, and major scientific centres alike, reminding observers that a body returning every 76 years could tie local memory to planetary time.

1963-1980s: Roots of the UG Astronomical Society

The University of Guyana's early science culture and the Space Race era create the soil from which organized university astronomy later grows.

When the University of Guyana opened in October 1963, it was a young evening institution of 164 students, sharing facilities at Queen's College and the Government Technical Institute. Natural Sciences was one of its founding faculties, and the university itself was part of the intellectual infrastructure of a country approaching independence. It gave Guyanese students a place to study the physical world in their own national setting.

The 1960s were also the decade of the Space Race. Sputnik, Gagarin, Apollo, and the 1969 Moon landing made astronomy and spaceflight part of everyday public imagination across the world. In Guyana, that atmosphere combined with the new university's scientific ambition and with the country's equatorial sky, visible to both northern and southern constellations.

The documented University of Guyana Astronomical Society, however, appears to belong to a later chapter. The strongest available university sources state that Alfred Bhulai, a Chemistry lecturer in the Faculty of Natural Sciences, established the Society in the early 1980s. From the roof of the physics building, Bhulai hosted star parties for students and residents of Cummings Lodge, using the Rodrigues/Burnham telescope to show planets, constellations, meteor showers, and eventually Halley's Comet.

This means the older claim of a firm 1960s founding should be treated cautiously. The better story is one of roots and growth: UG's 1963 beginnings and the Space Race era created the intellectual climate, while Bhulai's early-1980s work gave the Society its documented organized form. That thread later faded, revived, and continued to influence Guyanese astronomy outreach.

1973: 1973 Eclipse at Sunrise

The 30 June 1973 total eclipse begins over Guyana at sunrise: totality crosses the interior and the Berbice coast, while Georgetown sees a 98% partial eclipse.

On the morning of Saturday, 30 June 1973, one of the longest total solar eclipses of the twentieth century began its journey across Earth over the Guianas. The Moon's umbral shadow first touched down near the Guyana-Brazil border, then swept northeast through the interior and toward Suriname and the Atlantic. Along that narrow interior path, the rising Sun was hidden by the Moon and the corona appeared at the horizon.

The event must be recorded carefully. Guyana was genuinely touched by the path of totality. Georgetown lay just north of the path and saw a deep partial eclipse, with about 98% of the Sun covered; east of the city the path reached the coast, and New Amsterdam saw about two minutes of totality with the Sun only 3° above the horizon. NASA path data place the capital outside the northern limit of totality. The later afternoon time sometimes repeated for this event is also wrong: in Guyana this was a sunrise event, around 6:10 a.m. local time, when the Sun was still low in the east.

What made the eclipse famous worldwide was its duration. With the Moon near perigee and Earth near aphelion, the lunar disk appeared large enough to cover the Sun for an extraordinary maximum of about 7 minutes 4 seconds over Africa. Expeditions by ship, aircraft, and ground camp followed the track from the Atlantic into the Sahara and East Africa.

The most celebrated expedition was Concorde 001. Fitted with special observing ports, the supersonic aircraft intercepted the Moon's shadow over Africa and remained inside totality for roughly 74 minutes, the longest total-eclipse observation ever achieved. Its scientists studied the corona and chromosphere while flying at high altitude and high speed.

Guyana's place in the story is real and distinctive: the great shadow first met Earth in its interior. For observers in Georgetown, the memory would have been of a strange dawn crescent and a darkened morning, while for later Guyanese astronomy advocates the eclipse became part of the country's growing modern sky consciousness. Specific claims that Alfred Bhulai photographed the 1973 event or that newspapers and radio carried extensive local coverage remain unverified and are best treated as local memory unless primary records surface.

1986: Halley's Comet Returns, 1986

Halley's 1986 return brings global spacecraft science and local UG observing into the same cometary moment.

When Halley's Comet returned in 1986, it was scientifically historic but visually difficult for much of the Northern Hemisphere. Perihelion came with the comet on the far side of the Sun from Earth, making it fainter and lower than many expected. Guyana's near-equatorial position helped: observers could look into both celestial hemispheres, giving them a better geometry than many northern locations.

The global context was extraordinary. The Halley Armada - Vega 1 and 2, Suisei, Sakigake, and ESA's Giotto - converged on the comet in March 1986. Giotto returned the first close-up images of a comet nucleus, helping confirm the dirty snowball model and making Halley not only a public spectacle but a landmark in planetary science.

In Guyana, Alfred Bhulai's work at the University of Guyana gave the apparition a local home. Public star parties were held on the flat V-roof section of the UG physics building, using the Rodrigues/Burnham telescope. A UG physics student located and tracked Halley's Comet in 1985 as a final-year research project, connecting the university's small astronomy community to the worldwide campaign.

Guyana also marked the return philatelically, issuing a Halley's Comet stamp in 1986. The exact role of named assistants and any radio or television broadcasts are not verified in reliable sources, so the safest account is this: Halley's return was observed through UG's astronomy circle, remembered through public outreach, and connected Guyana to a once-in-a-lifetime global scientific event.

2009: International Year of Astronomy

Guyana appears on the official IYA2009 national-node roster, though surviving records of local 2009 programming are thin.

The United Nations proclaimed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy to mark 400 years since Galileo first turned a telescope toward the sky. Led by UNESCO and facilitated by the International Astronomical Union, IYA2009 used the theme The Universe, Yours to Discover and became one of the largest science-outreach efforts ever organized, with 148 countries and hundreds of millions of participants worldwide.

Its signature projects were designed to give ordinary people a first telescope experience. The 100 Hours of Astronomy, Galilean Nights, the low-cost Galileoscope, Dark Skies Awareness, From Earth to the Universe, and Developing Astronomy Globally all carried the same message: astronomy should not belong only to observatories and universities.

Guyana is listed on the official IYA2009 roster of national nodes. That fact places the country inside the worldwide network, but the record should be stated honestly: Guyana appears without a linked national-node page or named public contact, and no contemporaneous source documents a full local programme of telescope nights, radio call-ins, or classroom demonstrations in 2009.

The Caribbean context was more visible around Guyana. Trinidad and Tobago hosted the IAU International School for Young Astronomers at the University of the West Indies, and Jamaica distributed Galileoscopes to schools and closed the year with a star party. In Guyana, the clearest legacy is the way IYA2009's public-science spirit anticipated the later growth of UGAS, AAAG, and AstroPhotosGY: local, accessible, and designed to invite people to look up.

2016-2018: AAAG Takes Shape

Ferlin F. Pedro and young volunteers build AAAG into a grassroots public-astronomy movement for Guyana.

The Amateur Astronomers Association of Guyana grew from an informal circle of Guyanese sky enthusiasts into a volunteer movement led by astrophotographer Ferlin F. Pedro. Its roots are public seawall sessions from around 2016, when Pedro and collaborators such as telescope-maker Mahendra Mahadeo brought modest instruments to Georgetown and invited passers-by to see the Moon and planets for themselves; the association itself launched as a non-profit in 2018.

AAAG describes itself as a non-profit educational movement promoting astronomy and science to the public. Its membership model is open and free, and its work has ranged from public star parties near the Georgetown Seawall bandstand to school visits, astrophotography lectures, online sky tours, radio appearances, telescope giveaways, and astronomy-themed competitions that tied science to Guyanese culture.

The association's importance lies in its method. It did not wait for a national observatory or a university programme to reach the public; it took telescopes into communal space and made the first look through an eyepiece a civic experience. The familiar shock of seeing Saturn's rings or the Moon's craters live, rather than in a textbook, became AAAG's most powerful teaching tool.

AAAG also placed Guyana's dark skies at the centre of its message. Pedro repeatedly argued that the country's largely unpolluted interior is a national asset for stargazing, education, and possible astro-tourism. In that sense AAAG connected amateur astronomy with environmental awareness, youth leadership, and pride in Guyana's place under the equatorial sky.

2014-2015: Home-built Telescope Milestone

Mahendra Mahadeo hand-builds a 6-inch f/6.5 Dobsonian reflector, proving advanced amateur telescope making is possible from Guyana.

Around 2014, self-taught amateur astronomer Mahendra Mahadeo of Ogle, East Coast Demerara, set out to build a telescope from the glass up. He had never even looked through a telescope before beginning. Good instruments were expensive and difficult to import, so he taught himself the craft through online resources and engineering patience.

Mahadeo built a hand-cranked mirror grinder, kept a handwritten journal, and worked a glass blank into a 6-inch f/6.5 parabolic mirror. He used Ronchi testing and learned to correct the classic errors of mirror making: zones, turned edges, over-correction, and under-correction. In October 2014 he tested the uncoated mirror on the Moon and Sirius, and by the end of that year the mirror was coated and mounted as a Dobsonian Newtonian reflector.

The 2015 placement in the timeline still makes sense as the instrument's first full observing season. That January, Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy brightened to near naked-eye visibility, with a green coma and a long photographic tail. The specific claim that Mahadeo photographed Lovejoy remains unverified in public sources, so the safer record is that his new telescope arrived just in time for one of the most accessible comet apparitions of the decade.

The achievement matters because amateur telescope making turns astronomy from consumption into creation. In a country where imported gear can be prohibitive, a hand-built 6-inch reflector under dark Guyanese skies becomes a serious instrument for planets, double stars, clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. Mahadeo later built larger and faster instruments and eventually worked in optical engineering, showing how local curiosity can grow into professional space-related craft.

2017: Partial Solar Eclipse

Guyana sees a partial eclipse of about 54% during the Great American Eclipse, prompting safe-viewing outreach at UG.

On 21 August 2017, the Moon's shadow crossed the continental United States in the celebrated Great American Eclipse. Guyana lay far outside the path of totality, but it still received a substantial partial eclipse. From Georgetown the Moon covered about 54% of the Sun at maximum, turning the afternoon Sun into a bright crescent rather than a vanished disk.

The eclipse began over Georgetown at about 2:48 p.m., reached maximum near 3:58 p.m., and ended close to 5:00 p.m. Linden and New Amsterdam saw 51-53%, and Lethem in the south about 41%. The common estimate of roughly 50% was close but imprecise; NASA's eclipse elements put Georgetown at 54.2%.

The University of Guyana Astronomical Society hosted a public viewing at Turkeyen, and local astronomy groups used the moment to teach safe observation. During a partial eclipse there is no safe instant to look directly at the Sun without protection. Eclipse glasses meeting solar-viewer standards, telescope solar filters, and simple pinhole projection were essential.

The event strengthened ties in the local astronomy community. Soon after, UGAS and AAAG took part in a joint astronomy seminar with regional partners, showing how a sky event can become a catalyst for education long after the Moon has moved on.

2018: Landmark Seawall Star Party

AAAG brings telescopes to the Georgetown Seawall, turning public space into an accessible astronomy classroom.

On 26 October 2018, the Amateur Astronomers Association of Guyana set up telescopes near the Georgetown Seawall bandstand and invited the public to look up. The seawall is one of the capital's great communal spaces, a place of evening walks, conversations, and Atlantic breeze. By bringing telescopes there, AAAG met people where they already gathered.

The event was not Guyana's first public star party - Ferlin Pedro had begun organizing seawall sessions around 2016 - and the surviving records support a turnout in the dozens rather than hundreds. Its importance lies instead in what it represented: a growing, youth-led public astronomy movement confident enough to make the night sky part of everyday civic life.

The targets were the classic first-look objects of outreach: the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. In 2018 Saturn's rings were tilted wide open near opposition, making the planet especially vivid through even modest instruments. For many visitors, the sight of a real ringed world in the eyepiece changed astronomy from an image on a screen into a lived experience.

The seawall star party sat within a wider AAAG programme that year, including an astro-poetry competition and public letters connecting astronomy to Guyanese culture. It helped frame stargazing not as a foreign or elite pursuit, but as something local, free, communal, and possible from Georgetown itself.

2018: Rise of Astrophotography

Guyanese astrophotographers begin presenting the country's dark skies as a cultural, educational, and astro-tourism asset.

As public star parties brought planets to the eyepiece, astrophotography carried Guyana's night sky to a wider audience. In the late 2010s, Ferlin Pedro and other enthusiasts began sharing images of the Moon, planets, conjunctions, and the Milky Way online, drawing questions about cameras, settings, and where such skies could be found.

Guyana has a genuine geographic advantage for this work. Its latitude near the equator gives observers access to both northern and southern constellations over the course of the year. Away from the coast, the Rupununi savannah, Iwokrama rainforest, Kaieteur region, Kanuku Mountains, and interior eco-lodges offer dark skies with far less light pollution than most urbanized countries can provide.

Astrophotography turned that darkness into evidence. A photograph of the Milky Way over Guyana is both a science image and an invitation, proving that the country's night sky is a natural resource worth preserving. In 2018, public commentary in Guyana already argued that astronomy had great potential because so much of the country remained free from heavy light pollution.

The rise of local astrophotography therefore became part of a larger idea: astro-tourism. Ranches, lodges, rainforest trails, and savannah nights could offer visitors and Guyanese alike a view of the universe many cities have lost. The camera made that possibility visible and helped tie cosmic wonder to national identity.

2020: Comet NEOWISE Graces the Skies

Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE appears low in the north-west after dusk during the pandemic, rewarding patient observers and cameras.

In July 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE became the most striking naked-eye comet visible from the Northern Hemisphere since Hale-Bopp. Discovered on 27 March 2020 by NASA's NEOWISE spacecraft, it survived perihelion on 3 July, passed closest to Earth on 23 July at about 0.69 AU, and will not return for roughly 6,800 years.

The viewing geometry needs correcting. NEOWISE was not low in the northwest before dawn. In early and mid-July it was a pre-dawn object low in the northeast; later, from about 12 July onward, it shifted into the evening sky low in the northwest. From Guyana's low northern latitude, the comet stayed low in the north-west after dusk, making it a challenging target through twilight, haze, rain-season cloud, and thick low-altitude air.

That difficulty made charts, binoculars, and camera guidance valuable. A specific AAAG NEOWISE chart release has not been independently verified in public sources, but AAAG's general online outreach, sky maps, and astrophotography education are documented. In a year when public gatherings were restricted, the comet was the kind of event that could be shared through online guidance while still being observed from yards, rooftops, and dark horizons.

NEOWISE was especially photogenic. A DSLR or mirrorless camera on a tripod, focused manually, could reveal the soft coma and tail in a few seconds of exposure even when the eye struggled. For Guyanese observers, it offered a brief pandemic-era connection to a visitor from the outer Solar System: distant, ancient, difficult, and worth the effort.

2021: IAU Outreach Coordinator Appointed

Guyana's astronomy outreach connects to the IAU's global National Outreach Coordinator network, though appointment details need careful sourcing.

The International Astronomical Union's Office for Astronomy Outreach maintains a worldwide National Outreach Coordinator network. NOCs act as national contact points for public astronomy, sharing IAU projects, supporting local educators and communicators, and connecting small astronomy communities to a global network. For countries without a large professional astronomy infrastructure, the programme can give grassroots outreach international visibility and support.

Guyana has a place in this outreach framework, and Ferlin F. Pedro's work with AAAG made him a natural figure for such a role. By 2021 he had spent years coordinating public star parties, school visits, online sky tours, and regional conversations about astronomy in the Caribbean. His advocacy centered on free public access, youth leadership, and the protection of Guyana's dark skies.

The precise public record is uneven. Open, readable IAU sources do not independently confirm the August 2021 appointment date or the deputy names previously associated with the entry. Similar AAAG member names appear in local records, but the spellings and surnames differ. Those details should therefore be treated as internal or pending confirmation unless an IAU page, email, or AAAG announcement is available.

What can be stated confidently is the broader significance: by the early 2020s, Guyanese astronomy outreach was no longer only local. Through AAAG, regional collaborations, and the IAU outreach framework, Guyana's small astronomy community was becoming part of an international effort to make the sky accessible to everyone.

2021: James Webb Space Telescope Launch

JWST launches from Kourou in French Guiana, giving Guyana a regional connection to humanity's most powerful space telescope.

On Christmas morning, 25 December 2021, an Ariane 5 ECA rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Centre near Kourou, French Guiana, carrying the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb was a partnership between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency, and it separated cleanly from the upper stage about 27 minutes after launch before beginning its month-long journey to the Sun-Earth L2 region about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

The geography matters. French Guiana is not Guyana; it is an overseas region of France, separated from Guyana by Suriname. Kourou lies roughly 640 kilometres east of Georgetown along the same Atlantic-facing equatorial coast. The correct connection is therefore regional rather than national: one of the most important scientific spacecraft ever built launched from Guyana's wider corner of South America.

Kourou is ideal for launches because it sits near the equator, where Earth's rotation gives rockets an eastward velocity boost. Webb itself was a folded infrared observatory of superlatives: a 6.5-metre primary mirror made of 18 gold-coated beryllium segments, protected by a five-layer sunshield roughly the size of a tennis court, designed to operate in deep cold at L2.

The public payoff arrived in July 2022 with Webb's first full-colour images and spectra: SMACS 0723, the Carina Nebula's Cosmic Cliffs, Stephan's Quintet, the Southern Ring Nebula, and the atmosphere of exoplanet WASP-96 b. Specific AAAG or AstroPhotosGY 2022 outreach using the images is not externally verified in public sources, but globally they became a defining teaching moment. For Guyanese stargazers, the launch had a special resonance: the road to those images began just down the Guianas coast.

2023: Partial Solar Eclipse Captured

Alfred Bhulai documents the 14 October 2023 annular eclipse as a 58.6% partial eclipse from Guyana.

On 14 October 2023, an annular ring-of-fire eclipse crossed the Americas from the western United States through Central and South America. Guyana was outside the central annular path, so observers there did not see a ring of fire. Instead, Georgetown saw a substantial partial eclipse, with the Moon covering about 58.6% of the Sun at maximum.

The timing was favourable for public awareness and photography. In Georgetown the partial phase began around 1:28 p.m., reached maximum near 3:05 p.m., and ended around 4:28 p.m. Linden and New Amsterdam saw similar or slightly higher coverage. The other solar eclipse of 2023, the April hybrid eclipse, was not visible from Guyana and should not be confused with this event.

Mr. Alfred Bhulai's capture of the 2023 partial eclipse at the University of Guyana fits a long personal history of astronomy outreach. Bhulai had hosted rooftop star parties at UG decades earlier and helped keep practical skywatching alive through changing generations of students. The 2023 image connected that older university tradition with modern solar-event documentation.

Because the eclipse was partial from Guyana, safe viewing was essential throughout. There was no moment when the Sun could be viewed directly without certified solar filters or projection. As in 2017, the event was as much a lesson in safety and celestial geometry as a visual spectacle.

2023: Birth of AstroPhotosGY

Samir Mohammed establishes AstroPhotosGY as a dedicated platform for Guyanese astrophotography, education, and sky access.

By 2023, Guyana's astronomy community had years of public star parties, university activity, and grassroots outreach behind it, but there was still no single always-open digital doorway for a curious Guyanese observer. AstroPhotosGY began to fill that gap. Founded by Samir Mohammed, a young Guyanese astrophysicist, developer, writer, and former President of the University of Guyana Astronomical Society, the project set out to bring astronomy home to a local audience.

The platform was conceived as more than an astrophotography page. It aimed to inspire, educate, and connect people with the universe through images captured in Guyana, practical observing guidance, and learning resources written for the realities of Guyanese skies. Its founding should be kept distinct from AAAG: Ferlin Pedro founded the Amateur Astronomers Association of Guyana, while AstroPhotosGY is Mohammed's separate but complementary initiative within the same national astronomy ecosystem.

Guyana's geography gives the project a strong foundation. Near the equator, observers can see deep into both northern and southern skies across the year; away from the coast, the interior still holds dark skies that many countries have lost. AstroPhotosGY was built around the idea that those conditions are not just scenic, but educational and cultural resources.

The 2023 date is best understood as the beginning of the initiative rather than a fully documented public launch. The richer public record comes later, but the seed was clear from the start: to make Guyana's night sky visible, understandable, and shareable for everyone.

2024: AstroPhotosGY Content Expansion

AstroPhotosGY grows into a digital observatory with galleries, learning content, sky-event tools, and a 3D solar-system experience.

Through 2024, AstroPhotosGY grew from an idea into a working platform: a digital observatory, classroom, gallery, and cultural archive for the Guyanese night sky. Much of the work was self-built by Samir Mohammed, who combined astronomy, data, web development, geolocation, and orbital calculations to create tools that could serve users across Guyana.

At the centre of the platform is its sky-event functionality: location-aware visibility information for planets, constellations, galaxies, lunar phases, sunrise and sunset, and special events. Built with modern web tools and astronomical calculation libraries, it turns abstract ephemerides into practical guidance for urban, rural, and remote observers. The interactive 3D solar system adds another layer, letting visitors see planetary motion as something dynamic rather than static.

The surrounding archive expanded in parallel. The Gallery showcases astrophotography captured and processed in Guyana; the Learn hub introduces astronomy from beginner to advanced levels; and the History timeline situates local milestones beside Indigenous sky knowledge, colonial science, amateur societies, and modern outreach. Planned community photo submissions, school resources, equipment access, and further traditional-knowledge work point toward a broader citizen-science future.

Some 2024 milestone claims should be kept modest because several features matured publicly in 2025 or remain ongoing. The safe story is still strong: by 2024, AstroPhotosGY had become the framework for a free, Guyana-focused astronomy platform built around education, dark-sky awareness, and local participation.

2025: Lunar Eclipse Documentation Project

AstroPhotosGY documents the fully visible 14 March 2025 total lunar eclipse from Guyana, a well-placed Blood Moon over the Americas.

In the early hours of Friday, 14 March 2025, the full Worm Moon slipped into Earth's shadow and turned copper-red over Guyana. The eclipse was fully visible across the Americas, and Guyana was especially well placed: the Moon stood about 45° up in the western sky, clear of the horizon for the entire event, weather permitting.

Local timing made it a true night project. The penumbral phase began just before midnight on 13 March, partial eclipse began at 1:09 a.m., totality ran from 2:26 to 3:32 a.m., and greatest eclipse came at about 2:58 a.m. The last penumbral shading cleared around 6:00 a.m. A local notice by Alfred Bhulai correctly described it as visible all over Guyana in the western half of the sky.

The red colour of a Blood Moon comes from Earth's atmosphere. During totality the Moon receives no direct sunlight; instead, sunlight bends around Earth, filtered by the same scattering that reddens sunrise and sunset. Blue light is scattered away, while red light enters the umbra and paints the lunar surface copper, orange, or brown depending on dust and aerosols in the atmosphere.

For astrophotographers, a total lunar eclipse is both safe and technically demanding. No solar filter is needed, but exposure changes dramatically: bright partial phases require short exposures, while totality can need higher ISO, wider aperture, and multi-second frames on a steady or tracking mount. RAW capture, bracketing, and a full sequence allow the event to be assembled into a progression.

AstroPhotosGY's documentation project is best described as the platform's own account unless external records are available; claims that it was the most comprehensive record in Guyana or a confirmed multi-location national archive are not independently verified. Even so, the event was a genuine opportunity to add a careful Guyanese photographic record to the country's growing archive of sky events.