The Patience of Light

About this book

On a green ridge almost exactly on the equator stands the Segara Ridge Observatory, a century-old station whose true treasure is not its telescope but its basement: half a million glass photographic plates, a hundred years of kept sky. Dr Mara Zuhra is the last astronomer there who can still read them. Her speciality is light echoes, the ghostly arcs of old starlight that reflect off interstellar dust and replay ancient eruptions to modern eyes, sometimes centuries after the event. The echoes around one dead star will not behave, and the pattern they trace is not one nature could have arranged.