13 Oct 2018. Inner Light 📖 “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” Those words of Jesus Christ comes from the Christian Bible. Having just spoken to his listeners about the futility of lighting a lamp in a house but then covering it up, he goes on to instruct them to make sure to let nothing obscure the inner light of grace, mercy, wisdom, patience, kindness, love, forgiveness, and joy that he was making available to them. 💡 In general, artificial light is not the friend of astronomers and astrophotographers. When it gets in the way of our observing or our photography, we refer to it as “light pollution”, a name that doesn’t have any hint of positivity at all. For this photo, though, I used artificial light in the form of my LED Lenser headlamp/torch to make some inner light seem to beam and burn out from the windows of this little church. Of course, the celestial lights above the church are the reason I was at this spot taking photos, but I didn’t want to pass up the chance to give this old house of worship some inner light to brighten the scene. 📷 Although I could have captured this scene with a single image, I used nine shots from a 65-frame panorama that I was creating on the night. I photographed each of those nine images with a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm lens @ f/2.4, using a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #MagellanicClouds, #LargeMagellanicCloud, #SmallMagellanicCloud #church
11 Oct 2018. M is for Messier 🔭 Astronomers have many reasons for trying to find new comets in the Earth’s skies. One self-serving motivation is that the discoverer of a comet ends up having their name attached to the heavenly wanderer. Charles Messier, a French astronomer and professional comet-hunter, often observed comet-like objects through his 100 mm (4 inch) telescope, located in Paris. Most of the time these objects turned out to be something other than a comet, such as galaxies, star clusters and nebulae. To save himself and other astronomers from mistaking such things for comets in future, Messier compiled a list of all of these false-positives, aided by his friend and assistant Pierre Méchain. 🌌 These one hundred and ten objects comprise what is known as “The Messier Catalog”. Items number 31, 33 and 110 are featured in my photograph today, although M110 is only visible at full size on a large computer screen. M31 is also known as the Andromeda Galaxy and is obvious near the dark tree on the left of the image. Well, it’s not actually near the tree but around 2.5 million light-years away. Over at the top right-hand corner and above the tree there is M33, aka The Triangulum Galaxy, at a modest 3.3 million light-years distant. M110 is a barely-discernible small fuzzy patch between M31 and the tree, and sits at roughly the same distance from Earth as M31. 📷 I took this single-frame image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Canon 50mm lens @ f/2.2, using a 8.0 second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #galaxy #messier #andromedagalaxy #m31
10 Oct 2018. Sheltered under the Milky Way ✝️ This strange little structure is at the entrance to the grounds of the church & cemetery that I featured in yesterday’s post. The cross that’s at the centre of the gates sits atop a spike that gets placed into a small receptacle in the driveway below, and which has two prongs that lock into some metal piping on each gate, effecting a crude but functional latch. I guess the little shelter is there to keep the minister or grounds person dry while they open and close the gate in wet weather. Cute! 🌌 The shelter and gates weren’t the main reason I took this photo, as impressive as they are. Instead, it was the Milky Way’s core area, including the famous “Galactic Kiwi” that’s almost dancing atop the shelter, that I wanted to draw your eyes to. The clear and unpolluted skies of this location make it a simple task to bring out the filigrees of dark interstellar dust that look like wisps of cloud or smoke drifting across the treetops. High above the Milky Way’s beautiful band of galactic goodness is Mars, still making its presence known in our night skies by its bright and orange glow. 📷 I shot two photos of this scene while trying to work out a composition I was happy with. One of those included Mars and one didn’t, so I overlapped them in my stitching software and ended up with this final shot. As with a lot of my recent photos, I shot the two images that make up this image using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, with a 25-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams
09 Oct 2018. The sanctuary and its cemetery, under the stars ⛪ The piece of land on which this church sits was donated by a local family in 1865, and a timber structure was then built for the district's worshippers, opening in 1866. The building was used as a school for 40 local children through the week and for worship services for up to 80 Christians on Sundays. That original timber building didn’t survive long in the cold and often damp conditions here near Crookwell, Australia. Plans for a new stone sanctuary were drawn up in 1882. According to what little information I could find online, the church still contains a Bible and a Prayer Book that were donated by the family who gave the land back in 1866. ✝️ Behind the church is a small cemetery, which was opened in 1878, with the dead able to be interred for the sum of 5 shillings! To the north of the cemetery is the catchment of the Pejar Dam, the water supply for the nearby city of Goulburn. Glowing red on the horizon at the right of the shot, and lighting up the clouds that had drifted in to ruin my night of photography are the aviation warning lights atop several wind turbines. I posted a photo recently showing one of those turbines flanked by the Pleiades star cluster and the constellation of Taurus. 🌌 With Milky Way season nearing its end for 2018, the rich band of dust, gas and stars that makes up the core of our galaxy is hanging low in the southwestern sky now, making an excellent feature to set the church against. I still find this feature of the heavens to be one of the most beautiful and engaging things I’ve seen in nature. • • @space @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #panorama #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams
08 Oct 2018. Stars and wind and light ✨🐮 The Pleiades star cluster–aka “The Seven Sisters” and “M45”–is a beautiful sight in the eastern skies of my Southern Hemisphere from mid-winter through until late in autumn. You can see it here in my photo, between the wind turbine’s supporting pylon and the left side of the frame. In roughly the same position on the opposite side of the tower is the inverted vee-shape that is the most recognisable portion of the constellation of Taurus, The Bull. The Pleiades star cluster is, in fact, part of the constellation of Taurus. 🌬 The wind turbine–which was idle on this night, despite others nearby turning in the wind–did cut a slightly scary shape against the night sky. In the dark, it had me thinking of the “fighting machines” in HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds”. Although those gargantuan structures had multiple legs, I did still feel a little jittery at seeing such an imposing structure towering over the paddock where I was standing. 💡🤬 Apart from the stars in the sky, and the headlamps of a passing car that lit up the turbine, the only other source of light I could see was the horrible, yellow-green brightness on the eastern horizon. That ghostly glow is light pollution from the city of Sydney, whose central business district is a distance of 160 km (100 mi) from where I took the photo. 📷 This image is a single-frame photo that I shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, using a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens @ f/2.2, with an 8-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #pleiades #windturbine
06 Oct 2018. Swan trails 🐦 Today I’m brining you another image from my visit last weekend to Swan Lake, Australia. The photo is a star-trails composite shot, created by shooting a number of 25-second-long photos and combining them in software. 🕰 I’m out on another shoot as I type this tonight, so I’ll spare you a longer description, except to point out a meteor over on the left of the scene. 📷 I shot 75 single frames to make up this final image, and each one was taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, through a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ @ f/2.8, 25 sec @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #startrails #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams
04 Oct 2018. The sky over Swan Lake 😱☁️ Swan Lake, on the southeast coast of New South Wales, Australia, is one of the many places that I’ve heard of for years but not ever visited, until last weekend. I was here on Sunday night to try to photograph the Milky Way while it was low in the southwestern sky. A few minutes before I shot the last images that make up this panorama, the clouds moved in from the northeast to try and rain on my parade. 💡 Although this part of the coast is sparsely populated, the small holiday townships near the lake still produce their share of light pollution. Cudmirrah, over on the left, was pumping out white light, and near the middle of the shot, the yellow glow on the horizon is from fog-piercing lights on the Princes Highway, about 12 km (7.5 mi) distant. Some campers had a fire burning at the north end of the lake, and I love the little blossom of orange light that they added to the scene. 🌌 Mars is still unmissable in our southern skies late into the night, riding high over the middle of my photo. The Small Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy, snuck into the lefthand edge, for extra interest. I hope to get back here again before this Milky Way season ends. 📷 I shot 24 single photos to create this panoramic image and took each of those frames using a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24 mm lens @ f/2.4, for a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #sussexinlet #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams
01 Oct 2018. Seismograph 👻 My eye–and my mind, for that matter–seems to be quickly drawn to things that are quirky, strange, ironic, and often to things that are plain weird. That explains why, while looking through the images that I took last night (Sunday 30th September 2018), I noticed a strange red squiggle in the lower-right section of this one. 🌌 If you look at the reflections of the stars that I photographed, you can see that they aren’t dots of light, but have been stretched into almost-vertical streaks. Rippling of the water, by the very slight breeze that was blowing across the lake’s surface during the 25 seconds that the camera’s shutter was open, was responsible for this. That same rippling has also stretched the reflection of the lights of a passing aircraft. One of the plane’s lights was blinking on and off, with its fading then brightening glow being turned into what looks like a seismograph trace on top of the water. It wasn’t what I’d intended to shoot–and if you’d been with me you would have heard me politely cursing at the aircraft for ruining my photos–but it’s something different that I thought you might find interesting. 📷 This is a single-frame image that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, 25-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #reflections #aircraft #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl @southcoasttravelguide #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams @southcoastregister
30 Sep 2018. Light after life 🕰🙏 I know that my posts have been erratic of late, so thanks for hanging in there and waiting for another one. 🌌✝️ Despite the sad-looking forecast that my “Clear Outside” cloud app was showing, I decided to go out on Saturday night (28th September) to try for some Milky Way in photos. I had about an hour of clarity before the clouds moved in over my spot at the Kangaroo Valley Cemetery (Australia), and this was my best image of the night. I used two LED lamp banks to light up the gravestones, one of them having a warm 3200K filter and the other a standard white LED output. I think the combination gives the monument an eerie look. 📷 I shot the photo with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, exposed for 25 sec @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #milkyway #kangaroovalley #cemetery #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams
25 Sep 2018. Bioluminescence on Mars 😱 This whole scene looks very eerie, to me. The time was around 3:00 am, and Mars was very low in the southwestern sky. Its reflection was so bright! The bioluminescence in the water was also brilliant, and I wanted to line the two up so that the light from Mars would be reflected in one of the small pools of bio on the sandbar. 👏 There have been several photos that I’ve posted where I’ve mentioned my amazement that the light from a celestial object, so far away from us, is still strong enough to penetrate our atmosphere and then be reflected off some wet surface. Being able to pair that amazement with my excitement at photographing bioluminescence for the first time was worth all of the failed shots that it took to get this one. Failing is one of the many great things about digital photography, though. Learning from a failed photo is way cheaper and requires so much less time in the digital realm that it ever did in the film days. 📷 This photograph is a single-frame image that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm lens @ f/2.4, for a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #mars #bioluminescence @eurobodalla
22 Sep 2018. Sunset at “The Dish” 🌕 Featured in the 2000 movie “The Dish”, the 64 metre (210 foot) radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, has been described as “the most successful scientific instrument ever built in Australia”. In operation since 1961, The Dish is primarily a research radio telescope but has also been pressed into service several times to receive television, tracking and telemetry signals from a variety of space missions. These include Apollo 11, Mariner 2, Mariner 4, Voyager 1 & 2, Giotto, Galileo and Cassini Huygens. I had the opportunity to photograph this Australian icon today and was pleased when my planning and map-reading skills came together to place me right where I needed to be to catch the setting sun casting the dish in silhouette. 📷 This single-frame image was shot with Canon EOS 6D, Samyang 500 mm lens @ f/8, a 1/4000 sec exposure @ ISO 100. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #csiro #thedish #radioastronomy
19 Sep 2018. Not THE best, but my best 👏🏻 I’m confident that this is not the best photo of the Andromeda Galaxy ever taken. There’s no question about that. Still, it’s the best photo that I’ve shot of this island of stars, and I’m excited about it. 💡 Why the excitement? I took this photo without the aid of a telescope, using my DSLR camera and an old 75-300mm zoom lens, mounted on a very basic star tracker. The exposure time was only thirty seconds! For many years I expected that being able to take anything other than fuzzy and small photos of this astronomical wonder would require a telescope and many hours of exposure time. Yes, I know that to get decent photos involves those things, but for a 30-second shot that I took through a lens that came off my nephew’s old Canon 35mm film SLR, I think I did pretty well. If you are viewing this photo on your phone, you can swipe leftwards to see an annotated version that includes pointers to some dust lanes in the galactic disc, as well as two companion galaxies of M31. Of course, if you want serious images of this galaxy, you can hit Google and search for “Andromeda galaxy images” to see some incredible visual delights. An added bonus was that I caught a meteor’s death as it burned up in our atmosphere. 🔭 Also known as “M31”, sometime around 964 AD, the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi recorded this galaxy as a “nebulous smear”, and star charts of that period labelled it the “Little Cloud.” Until 1925–less than 100 years ago–the Andromeda Galaxy was still thought to be a nebula–a cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionised gases–that resided in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Following extensive observations and measurements by many astronomers, and some defining work by Edwin Hubble, the matter was settled, and M31 was declared to be another galaxy, external to our own, and at a distance of around 2.5 million light-years from Earth. 📷 I used the following equipment and settings to get this photo: Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera; Canon 75-300mm lens zoomed to 300mm, at an aperture of f/5.6. The exposure time was 30 seconds at an ISO of 6400, and I had the “Long Exposure Noise Reduction” feature turned on.
18 Sep 2018. Planets on a placid river 💡 I couldn’t feel any breeze at all while standing here on the Silo Farm Bridge, over the Tuross River, back in early September of 2018. There must have been some movement of air because while I was setting up to photograph this serene scene, a small cloud floated across the lower part of the sky and into my field of view. You can almost imagine that it’s a white pillow on which someone has set a giant pearl for display. The “pearl” in this case is the planet Venus, very bright, very white, and very close to the horizon. This quiet stretch of the Tuross River provided an almost-perfect mirror to reflect Venus’ orb, as well as that of the planet Jupiter, up and to the right of our pearl of the night. 🌌🔭 Almost lost in the glow and glare of the Milky Way’s galactic core area is another of our Solar System’s more massive planets, the lovely Saturn. Above the Milky Way and those three planets is Mars, noticeably more orange than the others and possibly enjoying not having to share its part of the sky with them. The God of War, as Mars is known, has to stand out, after all! The distinct while pillar of light stretching from below Venus and up towards Mars is the Zodiacal Light, a prominent feature of the after-dusk skies of the southern hemisphere at this time of year. 📷 I used two LED banks, fitted with “warm” colour filters, at either end of the bridge, to provide illumination on the river banks and the frontmost trees. This single image that you’re looking at is made up of eleven individual overlapping photos that have been combined by a process called “stitching”. I took each of those eleven shots with the following equipment and settings: Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, using a 20-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #planets #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams
17 Sep 2018. A Magellanic midnight 🕰 The time was three minutes past midnight when I shot the two photos that make up this image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). That’s close enough to midnight to fit the title, I reckon. This beautiful, cloud-like feature of the Southern Hemisphere’s night skies often has me standing in the dark, staring up as it makes another lap of the South Celestial Pole. It was around forty years ago that I first saw the Large Magellanic Cloud and its smaller sibling in the sky, after reading about them in an astronomy book in our high school’s library. There have been plenty of times since then that I have made the same mistake I made those forty years ago, thinking it to be a more earthly cloud that was drifting in to ruin my night’s viewing. 🔭 Below the centre of this dwarf galaxy, there’s a large, bright and green point of light. This object is commonly known as the Tarantula Nebula, although to astronomers it goes by the less romantic name of 30 Doradus, due to its location within the constellation Dorado. On a cloudless and moonless night, you can make out the nebula without binoculars or a telescope. 📷 Although the LMC can easily fit within the field of view of the 50mm lens that I shot this photo with, I used two overlapping images so that I could capture the LMC and the tops of the trees over which it had not long risen at the time of shooting. Each of those two images was shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, through a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens @ f/2.8, with an 8 second exposure time @ an ISO of 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #largemagellaniccloud #magellanicclouds #galaxies
16 Sep 2018. The Milky Way & me. 🤳🏼 I don’t like selfies, but the shots I took of the Milky Way over this viewing platform looked empty without a person in them, and I was the only person available. Although the viewing platform is located at the Tianjara Falls, in the Morton National Park, Australia, there was no view of the falls, and no falls for me to view. The drought that’s settled in across most of the state of New South Wales has left the Tianjara Creek, the watercourse that feeds the falls, totally dry. The darkness of night took away any view of where the falls should have been. 🌌 The Milky Way’s distinctive band of stars and dust was almost parallel to the horizon. Directly under the Galactic Kiwi/Dark Horse Nebula, there’s a yellow glow coming from behind the tree line, which is light pollution given off by the city of Canberra, about 110 km (70 mi) away. Now that we’re into spring the level of moisture in the air is starting to increase, evidenced by a slight haziness in the sky. The green background colour in the sky that you can see is from atmospheric airglow. 📷 I took this single-frame photograph last Friday night, 14th September, using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, exposed for 25 seconds @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams
14 Sep 2018. Grasping for the galaxy ☝🏼 The limbs of these dead trees seem to be reaching up and grasping for the rich and colourful core of our Milky Way galaxy, and the planet Mars as well. 😱 Jupiter is about to be eclipsed by the trees on the left, while not far above it a pair of satellites reflect the light of the sun from their high orbit. 📷 Canon EOS 6D, Samyang 14mm @ f/2.8, 20 sec @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams @eurobodalla
13 Sep 2018. Oh, what a night! 👊👏🏼🎉 Zero breeze. No clouds. Venus, hanging low in the west, with Jupiter not far above. Zodiacal Light. Reflections on the river. Fish, jumping and splashing in the river. Only one vehicle passing by in over three hours. Gorgeous green airglow to backlight the sky. Oh, and that magical, majestic, mystical and mammoth Milky Way in all of its excellent, enchanting, entrancing and eye-opening detail. 💯 🌌 Yeah, it was a good night. 📷 I shot this single-frame photo last Saturday night, 8th of September 2018, at one of my favourite locations near Bodalla, a dairy-producing region on the southeast coast of the state of New South Wales, Australia. The equipment and settings I used were: a Canon EOS 6D MkII camera, fitted with a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, exposed for 20 seconds @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #venus #jupiter #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #StargazingABC #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams
11 Sep 2018. Blue bonus 😱 Over the past weekend, I drove down to my family’s holiday shack at Tuross Head, Australia, for a bit of a mental health break in the hope of grabbing some more nightscape photos. Friday night was cloudy, so I didn’t get any photos. On Saturday night it started out the same again, but I still spent about an hour and a half driving around looking for somewhere with clearer skies. I struck out, so headed back to the house to read for a while then get another (relatively) early night. 👏🏻👏🙏 A little after 11:15 I decided to have one last, but not hopeful, look outside before going to bed. The clouds were gone! I changed out of my pyjamas and into warm clothes for several hours out in the cold (it’s early Spring here). Knowing that the Milky Way would be past halfway down the southwestern sky, I drove to a spot along the eastern shore of the lake and set up my camera and tripod. What are those lights in the water, I wondered? Could it be…yes! Bioluminescence was making the tiny waves blue, and there were little pools of blue water along the sand left bare by the falling tide. 📷 My photo for today was shot when most of the Milky Way’s core region was in the hazy part of the sky below ten-degrees elevation. The planet Saturn was low in the west (about 1/3 in from the right of the shot), and you can see its reflection coming right across the lake to the sand in the foreground. I enhanced the glow of the bioluminescence by throwing and splashing water that I’d scooped from the shallows. This photo is a single-frame image that I photographed with a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm lens @ f/2.8, using a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #universe #universetoday #bioluminescence #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #tuross #saturn
06 Sep 2018. A half-arched effort 😉 This photo is my first post for a few days, so I hope you’re all still there. (Mental health issues are a bummer, but I'm pushing through and even felt interested in photography again today). It’s a stitched image that I shot in July while visiting the northeastern corner of my home state of New South Wales, Australia, for the Star Stuff II “Festival of Space, Science and Astronomy”. I shot three seventeen-image rows of photos with the intention of making a full-arch panorama, but am only bringing you a sixteen-image segment of that tonight. Half an arch, if you will. 😱 This location, between the town of Woodburn and the city of Lismore, is in sugarcane country. The disused and decrepit silo is a testament to nature’s determination to bring forth new life, evidenced by the tree growing out through the side and top of the structure. The cane hadn’t long been harvested, and some recent rain had left the ground soft and soggy, in turn leaving my shoes and jeans wet and muddy. 💡 The glow from street lighting in the towns of Woodburn (left-of-frame) and Coraki (right-of-frame) serves as a reminder that even out “in the country” a little bit of light pollution goes a long way. 📷 This cropped version of the photo was created from sixteen original images that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D camera, using a Rokinon 24mm lens @ f/2.4, with each image exposed for 15 seconds @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #elitelongexposures #fantastic_universe #globalpixels #ig_astrophotography #ig_shutterworld #night_shooterz #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #night_excl #panorama #super_longexpo #milkyway #galaxy #MilkyWayChasers #starstuff #MilkyWayGrams