Star light, star bright

Nalayini Davies learnt to look up from her grandfather. “He was a science teacher, and I have clear memories of getting up very early one morning, around 5am, to look at a very bright, naked-eye comet that was in the night sky, and also the total solar eclipse,” she says, as she reminisces about her childhood in Sri Lanka. “At the simplest level, there’s a beauty in the night sky – just simple beauty. But at the next level, it makes you think about the universe, where we fit into the bigger picture.”

Astronomy has remained a strong interest through Nalayini’s life, despite a career in finance. She studied