Chapter Ninety: Astronomy

To know the heavens above and the earth below—this was ancient Huaxia’s praise for the truly learned.

Since the earliest days, astronomy had walked alongside humankind.

In an age without GPS or mobile phones, astronomy was an essential part of life.

By day, people read the time from the sun; by night, they found their bearings by the stars.

Master astronomy, and you need never fear losing your way when you travel.

For the sky was always the most precise of guides.

The vast, boundless heavens were silent and solemn, distant and mysterious.

Over the long span of human history, this had given rise to countless interpretations of the night sky.

The Three Enclosures, the Four Symbols, the Twenty-Eight Lodgings of ancient Huaxia, and the 88 modern international constellations.

There had even been extraordinary figures in history who divined the eight trigrams by observing the heavens at night.

Modern people looked to the stars for fortune and personality.

Of course, Lin Nan had never really believed in such mysterious things. He had always felt that a person’s fate rested in his own hands.

Just like on the basketball court, every game-winning shot was never mere luck, but proof of strength and the result of daily effort.

Still, after these past few days of checking reference after reference, Lin Nan had come to feel that astronomy was truly an immensely profound discipline, one that required far too much to learn.

As for questions like whether the universe had an edge, whether extraterrestrial life existed, what lay inside a black hole, and so on—those puzzles everyone wondered about but no one had yet solved—Lin Nan did not delve too deeply.

He knew those questions were far beyond the reach of the knowledge he possessed at present.

Right now, Lin Nan only wanted to learn astrophotography and capture the brilliance of the starry sky.

In the process, he had also learned of a saying:

Astronomy ruins a life; photography ruins three generations.

A basic astrophotography setup—the three essentials of an astronomical telescope, an equatorial mount, and a modified DSLR or CCD camera—would cost at least seven or eight thousand yuan altogether.

And that was only the bare minimum. If one wanted sharper, higher-quality astrophotographs, the price would only climb higher and higher.

Lin Nan instantly felt how expensive this hobby truly was. Even though he had already earned a million from basketball, he was not someone without any sense of money.

He knew very well that, by this standard of spending, most families simply lacked the means to dabble in astrophotography.

Of course, the starry sky itself was free. Anyone could lift their eyes to it at night.

But after Lin Nan saw the photos posted by the senior members in the astronomy group—images taken after they had gone out with their gear—he was certain he wanted to plunge in as well.

The sky, which the naked eye saw only as scattered points of light, became breathtakingly beautiful under the power of technology.

Sharp lunar craters, sunspots, the iridescent Milky Way, nebulae, star rivers... even satellites and space stations launched by humankind could be captured and rendered as photographs.

He also learned that astrophotography could roughly be divided into three major categories.

Wide-field landscape astrophotography, deep-sky astrophotography, and planetary photography.

Wide-field landscape astrophotography usually combined scenery with the night sky, with subjects such as the Milky Way, moonlit scenes, star trails, meteor showers, and the like.

The resulting images were often dreamlike, like a fairy tale night—colorful, serene, and harmonious.

Deep-sky astrophotography, by contrast, usually did not include any foreground at all. As the name implied, it captured the depths of the heavens: specific galaxies, constellations, and other far-flung objects.

The effect was utterly awe-inspiring, making the immensity of the cosmos immediate and unmistakable.

This kind of shooting, however, demanded extremely specialized astronomical knowledge, and Lin Nan was still far from that level.

As for planetary photography, as the name suggested, it meant photographing the planets within the solar system: Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, the surface of the moon, comets, space stations, and more.

For instance, photographing the moon—or, more precisely, lunar craters—was a common choice for many beginners, and it was also Lin Nan’s first target.

Once the goal was set, it was time to act.

A year of basketball training had turned Lin Nan into a boy with formidable execution. So with the veterans in the astronomy group recommending equipment, Lin Nan immediately used his phone to buy a starter astrophotography set online.

It cost more than eight thousand yuan.

Part of it came from the four-thousand-yuan bonus the basketball team had earned for winning the championship, and the rest from the red-envelope money Lin Nan had saved over more than a decade of New Year’s gifts.

On this point, Lin Lang and Ye Xinlan were unlike many other parents. Ever since Lin Nan had first begun receiving New Year’s money, they had set aside each year’s amount separately for him.

As he grew a little older, they discovered that Lin Nan was very frugal with money, and had basically never spent recklessly.

So they handed those savings over to Lin Nan to keep himself.

What began as one or two hundred yuan, then rose to five or six hundred, and later to more than a thousand each year, had steadily increased—just like Huaxia’s economic development and the rise in average living standards, advancing step by step.

Thus, by the time Lin Nan turned fifteen—now—he had just enough to buy a starter astrophotography setup.

Not more, not less. It was truly a perfect coincidence.

Lin Nan told Lin Lang everything in full.

Naturally, Lin Lang would not object. Seven or eight thousand yuan meant very little to the family’s current circumstances.

What made Lin Lang happy was that Lin Nan now told him everything without reservation, father and son able to discuss anything together.

That was something precious in Huaxia families.

It had nothing to do with wealth. Many children were one person at school and another at home, and only a very small number of students could speak with their parents as freely as they would with classmates or friends.

And those rare families were, as a rule, happy ones, with a warm and easy atmosphere.

So learning to be friends with one’s child was truly important.

If a child could open his heart completely to you, then the parents were, for the most part, doing very well.

Every adolescent went through a rebellious phase. Perhaps in their hearts they knew their parents meant well, but maybe it was the tone, the attitude, that made them insist on doing things their own way.

Many parents worked themselves to exhaustion outside simply so their children could study hard and get into a good university.

And yet why was it that they could seem so agreeable to strangers, yet remain unable to speak calmly to the child dearest to them?

A son does not despise his mother for her looks; a child does not despise his home for its poverty.

For a normal child, whether he is dressed well, fed well, or given good things to drink matters far less than the attitude his parents show him.

Fortunately, Lin Lang had been given a second life.

He treated Lin Nan with patience, and Lin Nan now far exceeded his expectations.

The Million Club had taken its second step.

What surprised Lin Lang a little, however, was that Lin Nan had chosen the starry sky—or rather, astrophotography.

To make a million from this field would likely be difficult.

From Lin Lang’s understanding, it seemed less like earning enough and more like endlessly losing money; whether one could even get started was itself a question.

Then Lin Lang suddenly remembered that in his previous life, decades later, there had been a starry-sky travel trend that had remained popular for quite some time.

Of course, this “starry-sky travel” did not mean traveling into outer space. Rather, it meant camping in remote natural areas to watch the stars.

Because in the future, city skies truly would offer little to see.

But for now, the stars were still visible.

Lin Lang also believed in Lin Nan. If he could go from a basketball novice to a national champion in a single year, then what was a million?

With his father’s full support, Lin Nan became even happier and more motivated.

Lin Lang would also be coming home next weekend, right when all the astrophotography equipment arrived.

At that time, Lin Lang would drive with Lin Nan to Qinglan Mountain for his first astrophotography outing.

Over the phone, Lin Lang even asked whether they should buy a better set of equipment.

Lin Nan refused at once.

Because his Million Club plan began from nothing.

Everything had to depend on himself; only then would this “million” mean anything.

Using the prize money and New Year’s savings to buy the first starter kit, worth seven or eight thousand yuan, was still barely acceptable.

As for the more advanced gear later on, Lin Nan would figure out a way to earn the money himself.

After hearing that, Lin Lang instantly chided himself for not thinking as thoroughly as Lin Nan.

Indeed, having a million in hand in order to earn another million was not especially difficult.

The key was that many people did not have a million, and some did not even have five hundred thousand.

That was why earning the first million was so hard.

And Lin Nan was already on the road to the second million.

During the time before the equipment arrived, Lin Nan seized every spare moment after class to devour astronomical knowledge.

He came to understand why night had to be chosen for shooting in the mountains.

Because in astrophotography, the shooting environment mattered tremendously.

If one were photographing a relatively bright target like a planet, the demands regarding light pollution were not especially strict.

But if one wanted to photograph something dimmer—nebulae, galaxies, and especially the Milky Way, which Lin Nan most longed to see—then a good shooting environment was absolutely necessary.

A proper environment meant being far from light pollution, under a night sky free of clouds and haze, and with no moon either, since moonlight was a powerful source of interference.

In the light-pollution map Lin Nan saw in the group, the residential districts were almost entirely engulfed. Under such conditions, the sky offered only a few scattered bright stars, and capturing a good astronomical image was impossible.

That was why the senior members in the astronomy group called each outing a “setup.”

Just like fishing: you had to find a lake with fish in it, bring your gear, and only then could you begin.

According to the veterans in the group, there were quite a few places within Lingnan City suitable for these outings, and Elder Brother Xiang and the more experienced astronomy enthusiasts in the group had all been there.

Among them, the closest to Lin Nan was Qinglan Mountain, which he had visited when he was a child.

And according to what Elder Brother Xiang said, Qinglan Mountain was the best outing spot of the lot.

Surrounded by mountains and sparsely populated, it had almost no light pollution.

So long as the weather was good, with no clouds and no haze, the summit of Qinglan Mountain in the dead of night was an ideal place for astrophotography.

A week passed in the blink of an eye, and the equipment had all been delivered to the house, signed for by Ye Xinlan on his behalf.

Lin Nan could hardly wait to see the real thing.

He had already watched the models and assembly process for astrophotography equipment on his phone no fewer than ten times, and was only waiting to try it with his own hands.

Since he was still a beginner, he did not tell Dong Si anything about astrophotography at all, and Dong Si naturally would not take the initiative to ask what he was doing.

Though during this period she had clearly noticed that Lin Nan was spending more time on his phone.

Lin Nan planned to wait until he had made some small achievement before giving her a surprise.

Yet what he had never expected was that the one who would receive the surprise was him.