In the desert stillness of Egypt’s Wadi El-Hitan (also known as Wadi Al-Hitan), a group of stargazers knelt on the cooling Fayoum sands as Mohammed Hassan’s green laser sliced through the ink-black sky to illuminate the glowing disk of Jupiter.

Wadi El-Hitan, or the Valley of the Whales, located in the Fayoum governorate southwest of Cairo, is famous for being an open-air museum, featuring 40-million-year-old whale fossils.