Stargazers add luster to little-known prefecture

Livestreaming meteors

On the evening of Aug 10, Liu, several members of the local government's logistics team and a few reporters from a local media center arrived at a meadow at an altitude of 2,600 meters above sea level. It is encircled by mountaintops and overlooks a river in the Tianshan Mountains.

They started pitching tents and made a fire to cook food and brew milk tea. At 10:30 pm, some other participants — Zhou Bo, an astronomy photographer and another co-founder of CSVA, and three CSVA engineers — finally arrived at the campsite. The four, who spent more than a day driving from Beijing to the site, were tasked with livestreaming the event online.

Wang left Beijing early that morning and reached the site after taking a flight and then a train. Two other photographers drove up from Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui autonomous region.

After dinner, the photographers, wearing down jackets, spread out around the site and started taking photos. The sky was clear, and the Milk Way looked close. The Perseids shooting across the dark sky caused cries of amazement from time to time.

A shooting star was seen every 15 to 20 minutes, Wang observed.

"It means that the meteor shower is active and peaking," he said.

On the morning of Aug 11, the whole group of less than 30 people returned to Hami city. They hung out there before heading to Dahaidao, a scenic area hidden in the middle of the Gobi Desert about an hour's drive from the town, in the evening.

"In the daytime, the desert is too hot and dangerous to stay," Liu explained.

Meanwhile, photos and video clips of the meteor shower taken by the photographers in the wee hours of the morning were published by local media outlets and began to appear on Chinese social media platforms.

After the last photographer, An Jiu, joined the group, they headed to Dahaidao and arrived at a campsite with a backdrop of a massive Yadan landform, or a barren area with wind-eroded landscape, at 9 pm. Because of the region's geographical location, the sun had just set.

While members of the logistics team made dinner at the site, Zhou and his livestreaming team went to the foot of a sheer cliff and prepared to livestream the meteor shower.

"We have to start livestreaming as soon as possible," Zhou said. "Otherwise, it will be too late for our viewers living in other parts of the country to hang on with us."

Skipping dinner, Zhou and his team held a two-hour livestream, and Wang shared the link on the websites of a couple of national media outlets. Millions of viewers tuned in to the live broadcast, Zhou estimated later.

On Aug 12, the group left Dahaidao in the morning and arrived in Barkol Kazak autonomous county.

From about 3 pm to midnight, Zhou and Wang took turns livestreaming the shooting star display on the bank of a wetland.

"It's hard work," Zhou said. "But I can cooperate with Junsong, or let An Jiu be my guest host. Believe it or not, I once livestreamed alone for 11 hours."

In that evening, the Perseids shower was a hot topic on Chinese social media.

After the live broadcast, some photographers continued to work into the wee hours of the morning, but were interrupted by a thunderstorm.

It rained on the morning of Aug 13 and was cloudy in the afternoon and evening. Zhou left his team to go to Qinghai province for a meeting on tourism development. Wang decided to livestream the meteor shower in the courtyard of the hotel they were staying at.

"We originally planned to work in a temple on the Tianshan Mountains," Wang said. "But it would have been too cold and pointless without a clear sky."

Fortunately, several CSVA photographers joined Wang's livestream and discussed their sightings from other parts of the country.

"Our platform is a gathering of photographers from across the country," Wang said.

"So even though viewers of our live broadcast can't see shooting stars from here, they can view them from other places."