Star gazer: Pomponia Martinez

Astronomy has always been an interest. I grew up on the Sunshine Coast, and as a child I would look up at these dark skies and my brother and sisters and I would pick out the constellations. When I came to Vancouver I joined the Royal Astronomical ­Society of Canada, Vancouver Centre.

Astronomy really gives us an awareness of where we are in the universe. It’s just this fascination; there is so much of the unknown. There are discoveries and technologies that are being developed that relate to space exploration, which I find intriguing.

I enjoy the kinds of people interested in astronomy. It draws those who are curious about our origins and our future, about science and technology, about cosmology and observational astronomy. It’s that curiosity that I find really interesting.

My favourite is a planetary nebula, so I try to find those. In a telescope it looks like a little ring; it’s very small.

When the sky is dark it’s pretty nice. My husband is also an amateur astronomer and we have a number of telescopes at home and though we have set our telescopes outside in Vancouver, there is just too much light pollution to see anything that’s called a deep sky, or deep space object. We normally like to go out to dark sites.