TEHRAN -- Iranian photographer and science journalist Babak Amini Tafreshi is sharing the 2009 Lennart Nilsson Award with NASA’s Cassini Imaging Director Carolyn Porco.

The award, which is the world’s most prestigious distinction in scientific and medical photography, will be presented in recognition of their photographic work that recalls mankind’s place in the universe.
The event’s panel citation reads as follows:
“Babak A. Tafreshi’s photographs reclaim a night sky that most modern people have lost. He takes us to remote places where the stars still look like they did at the dawn of mankind. His work calls to mind the beauty of the universe and human life on our planet.”
Babak A. Tafreshi, photographer, science journalist and amateur astronomer, was born in Tehran in 1978. His photographs from his expeditions around the world have been published in foreign journals, on TV and on the NASA website, and have been featured in a number of international exhibitions. From 1997 to 2007 he was editor, and later editor-in-chief of the Iranian astronomy magazine Nojum.
The annual Lennart Nilsson Award is presented in honor of the legendary Swedish photographer, who has been working with imagery at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm for decades.
Photo: The rotation of the earth is showed in a photo by Babak Amini Tafreshi at Iran’s ancient site of Naqsh-e Rustam, which is home to the tombs of the Achaemenid kings Darius I, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II, and several other sites dating back to the Elamite and Sassanid eras.