First Lights are envelopes that connect people to the universe. Modern astronomy uses computerized telescopes to discover tens of millions of new stars every year, which is thousands and thousands of new stars of every day. The only people who care about these newly discovered worlds however - research astronomers - could not care less what they look like. Once you’ve seen the 2+ billion of them that humanity has discovered (itself an impossible task), you’ve pretty much seen them all. Instead, these new neighbors we find around our galaxy are much more useful for their data: measurements like brightness, wavelength, flicker, and motion that can be plugged in en masse to scientific models so that these individually irrelevant stars can - in the aggregate - uncover new secrets of the universe. That’s all they’re good for.

The story of modern starlight is one where photons originate trillions and trillions of miles away, spend millions and millions of years getting here, and become destined to spend their life as a row of numbers in a database rather than as a glimmer in a human eye.

I find that deeply sad. But it doesn’t have to be.

If you think about what data get collected: brightness, wavelength, flicker — those are all visual pieces of information. Information that we get from the pictures we take of these things. Pictures of stars that we have discovered, named, and catalogued by the billion that nobody has ever actually looked at.

First Lights give those stars a chance to be seen, by you, for the first time.

I scrape, print, and seal these stars all without looking at them through a process done in close consultation with research astronomers across the globe to ensure that these stars are as unimportant and ignored as possible. The individual star in every First Light envelope is unique and never put in another envelope again. You do not own it. You cannot name it. You are merely the first to bear witness, and with your observation - a la Schrödinger - fasten it as really out there amongst the cosmos.