16 Jun 2019. It's getting late early 🌌 This phrase is one that a friend used to say when he was tired. He was a tradesman who started work very early each day, so I guess he knew what “getting late” meant. I thought of it when looking at this image since the position of the Milky Way–hanging low in the west and almost parallel to the horizon–is the same as what you see if you look in the sky early in the evening around October and November. It’s still June, but it’s getting late, early. 💤 💩 I shot the scene at around 3:00 am last Tuesday, so perhaps my lack of sleep was to blame for the photo being out of focus slightly. It might also be an excuse for losing a lens cap while trudging through the paddock and dodging cow cakes, after getting caught on some barbed wire on the way in. 📷 I used two overlapping photos to create the image because I couldn’t get the coverage needed with just a single shot. For each photo, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, with an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400. I used the now-discontinued program Autopano Pro to stitch the overlapping frames into one final output image.
14 Jun 2019. The planet over the pines 🌫 🌌 As I stood on the wooden bridge over the Tuross River at Cadgee, NSW, Australia last Friday night (7th June 2019), a hint of fog in the near-midnight air gave the brilliant light from the "gas giant" planet Jupiter a diffuse glow in the eastern sky. Not dense enough to dim the beauty of the Milky Way, the airborne moisture was well able to dampen the possum-fur beanie that I’d donned to keep my hairless scalp warm. 🌲 The pine trees are thick along the river’s bank at this point of the water’s wending way towards the Tasman Sea, some 20 km (12 mi) distant, and the warping of the wide-angle lens I used for this photo has seemingly bent the trees in towards the gravity of the wonders overhead. 📷 For this single-frame photo, I used a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, with an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.
13 Jun 2019. Seen with another's eyes 🤦‍♂️ How many times have I driven past this old barn during my 40+ years of holidays on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia? Several hundreds of times, I think, yet I know nothing of its age, its story, its uses or its destiny. Worse than knowing nothing about the structure, it was not until the weekend just passed that I used it in one of my nightscape photos. I’ve even photographed it during the daylight hours, never for a minute considering how great it might look lit up at night. 💡 It was while visiting friends further up the coast last Saturday that the man of the house, a professional truck driver, said that he’d noticed the barn a few times on his trips down south and thought how good it would look in one of my nocturnal photos. Once he said it, the idea seemed too obvious to have missed thinking of myself. Perhaps familiarity does breed contempt, as the saying goes. 🌌 Thanks to my friend Kevin I took the 15-minute drive from my holiday shack to photograph this ageing construction at around midnight last Tuesday, June 11th. The location–Bodalla–has exceptionally light-pollution-free skies, and I could make out most of the dark features in the sky even with my slowly failing eyes. 📷 This image is a single-frame photograph that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D camera, through a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.
10 Jun 2019. Before the sunshine 🌗🌞💫 If I were to ask you the question, “apart from space, what makes up our solar system?”, what would come to mind? It’s probably a fair guess to say that you thought of big things like the Sun (which accounts for 99.8% of the mass of the solar system), as well as planets, dwarf planets (hello, Pluto), moons, comets, asteroids, meteoroids, and all of the bits of metal that mankind has sent into space. 😉 Those answers are all correct, and as well as this big stuff there’s also dust. LOTS of dust spread across the same plane in which the planets orbit the Sun. In the autumn and spring months, it’s common to see this dust lit up in the dawn or dusk sky, depending on the season and whether you’re located north of south of the equator. This glowing dust is called the Zodiacal Light, also known as the “false dawn” because it is so bright it does look as if the first/last rays of sunlight are visible. The glow is sunlight being reflected and dispersed by these minute dust particles. 🌎 The Zodiacal Light is unmissable in this photograph that I shot this morning (10th June), and it is so bright that you can see that it’s lit up the water and some of the shoreline of Coila Lake, Australia. This lake is a non-tidal, enclosed waterway and its surface was all the more still due to there being no breeze at all, providing a perfect mirror to reflect the Zodiacal Light and plenty of stars. 📷 This image is a single-frame photograph that I took with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.
06 Jun 2019. Rise above the dead wood 🌌 Another of my "up close and personal" Milky Way images, photographed at Pyree, near Nowra, Australia. The dead trees can only look on as the immensity and majesty of the Milky Way rises into the Australian sky. 📷 Per most of my recent images, I photographed this scene using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Canon 40mm f/2.8 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.
04 Jun 2019. The Milky Way at 50 millimetres 📸 Even if you’re not a photographer, you probably know the difference between shots taken with a wide-angle lens, compared to those captured with a lens that’s known as a “telephoto”. Telephoto lenses have a narrow view and make objects look closer to the camera than they are. If you take a photo with a wide-angle lens, you will be able to fit more of a scene into the picture, but things will look further away than where they were. In between those two ends of the scale are lenses referred to as being in the “standard” category, with 50 mm being the most popular lens in this range, and that’s what I used for this image. Two appealing features of most 50 mm lenses is that 1) they’re relatively cheap–somewhere around $150 Aussie dollars for starters–and 2) they are “fast”, letting in a lot of light when opened to their maximum aperture. 🌌 Using a 50 mm lens for this photo has increased the sense of scale between the Milky Way and the earthly elements like the barn, the power poles and yes, once again, the pair of silos that I like to feature in my shots. The silos are near the centre of the image and are about 250 metres (820 feet) from where I took the photo. In the picture before this in my feed you can see the Milky Way rising from behind the silos, but with the camera placed only around ten metres from the derelict duo. That difference in the distance has the effect of making the Milky Way look huge in today’s image. 📷 I have already mentioned that I took this shot with a 50 mm lens fixed to my camera, but here are the details of the gear and settings overall. To capture this single-frame image, I used Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8 using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO6400.
01 Jun 2019. Another silo sortie 🔭 These sidelined silos will be familiar to folk who’ve followed me over the last two years. One of them made a cameo appearance in the last fortnight, in fact. 🌌 When I visited the site and shot this photo (plus a bunch of others) in April, the Milky Way’s core had not long cleared the decrepit corrugated iron roof that straddles the two concrete cylinders. 🌟 Much closer to Earth than our galaxy‘s centre, but looking here to be a bright spot in the dark nebula known as the Dark Horse or the Galactic Kiwi, Jupiter was also climbing into the evening sky. 📷 For this single-frame image I pushed my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera’s ISO setting to 12,800, shooting through a Canon 40 mm lens at f/2.8 for an exposure time of 10 seconds.
29 May 2019. When the stars (don't quite) align 🥴 Even after ten or so attempts, I still couldn’t compose this photo so that I had the central band of the Milky Way centred in the space between these two pine trees. Out of that bracket of shots, this one is the best, and I hope you can see that I was trying to put the terrestrial in touch with the celestial by using that alignment. 🚙💨✨ Nights as cloudless and bright as this one are what we nightscape photographers hope for when we read weather reports, prepare our equipment, fuel up our cars and motor into the darkness. There was a breeze blowing at this shooting location, but it wasn’t strong enough to buffet my camera or shake up my shots. 🐕 🐶 If photographs could record sound along with light, you’d probably be feeling irritated now by the farm dogs that barked away the silence each time I took a step, or closed my car’s doors, or ripped open a Velcro-sealed pocket. 📷 I captured this image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.
28 May 2019. No tinkering needed 💤 On nights like tonight, where I have a 5:30 start in the morning and am already tired from an unsettled sleep the previous evening, posting a photo that doesn't require any editing is a godsend. I always try to set up my pictures so that once I push the shutter button, I won't need to adjust anything in my editing software. Hitting that target doesn't often happen, though. Be it the lighting or composition; the focus, ISO, aperture or shutter speed settings; or the clumsy-human factor of bumping the tripod, there are many opportunities to get things wrong. 🌌 Happily, I managed to get all of that pretty much spot-on (at least by my standards) for this photo of Jupiter, Saturn and the Milky Way that I captured in mid-April south of Goulburn, Australia. Along with the rich tones of the Milky Way's core region and the starlike white burst from Jupiter, the photo also shows the green tint in the background sky generated by atmospheric airglow. If you look at the clouds near the horizon, you can see that this heavenly light silhouettes them. 📷 I shot this photo a few minutes after midnight on what I remember being a cold night, using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.
27 May 2019. Orion over the waves 🌫🌟 Although a thin layer of cloud covered the western half of the sky when I shot this photo, light from the stars of the constellation Orion still managed to make its way across space and onto my camera’s sensor. The Orion Nebula’s pinkish hue is prominent in the image just right of centre and about one quarter down from the top of the frame. The reflections of the stars in the shallow tidal pools are brighter than the actual stars themselves. Wave 🌊 The part of the sky that was cloud-free was showing lots of atmospheric airglow, which helped to light the foreground & make the shot viable. The white wave wending across the headland adds a lovely aquatic feature to the starry scene. 📷 This single-frame image was shot using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 800.
26 May 2019. Planetary diffusion 🌫 I didn’t see any fog hanging over the fields that I passed on my way to this location north of the rural town of Marulan, New South Wales, Australia, back in April. This stop was my fourth location of the night–an evening that saw me cover almost 600 km (372 mi)–and there’d been no sign of fog at any of those other places. One look at the lower left-hand quarter of my photo, though, reveals a blue-white bubble of haze entrapping the planet Jupiter, an unmistakable indicator of the high moisture content in the air. 🌌 With that much wetness in the sky, I’m surprised that the background stars are so sharp. The filigrees of dust and dark gas that are characteristic of this part of the Milky Way are almost as distinct as they are when viewed through dry air, too. Taking this photo was another one of the times when I saw the shot on my camera’s LCD, just after the shutter closed, and I let out an audible “wow!” There is a distance of about 27000 light-years between the tops of these trees and the centre of our galaxy, but here they both are, squished into the one frame of a photograph for me to marvel at. Awesome! 📷 For this single-frame photograph, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II DSLR camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.
22 May 2019. Ferdinand's Field ⛵️ Named for the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the two glowing clouds seemingly suspended in the sky over this field north of Goulburn, Australia, are known as the “Magellanic Clouds”. Magellan’s expeditionary fleet set out from Spain in September of 1519 and completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth in 1522. The man by whose name the voyage is now remembered didn’t finish the trip, though, meeting his end on the end of a spear during a battle on the island of Mactan, the Philippines, in 1521. 🌌 Although known of by indigenous people of South America and Africa for millennia, and within the first millennium CE by middle-eastern astronomers, it seems that European records of these two dwarf galaxies only date to around the 16th century CE. The Italian scholar Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s assistant and scribe, reported the sighting of the clouds during their voyage. Visible primarily in the Southern Hemisphere, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds only began to be associated with Magellan’s name sometime late in the 18th century. 🙏 From my location in Australia, the clouds are visible at night year-round, provided there’s a clear view to the south. Although I’ve been envious of the view that northerners have of the Andromeda Galaxy, aka M31, I can at least go outside on a clear night–moonlit or not–and see these fellow-travellers through the “local group” of galaxies. 📷 For this image, I shot seven single-frame photos in quick succession, then used the software “Starry Landscape Stacker” to composite them into a final picture that had less digital noise and better definition than any of the contributing images. The equipment and settings that I used for each photo were a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400. I set the camera on a fixed tripod, i.e. I didn’t use a star-tracker.
21 May 2019. Through evening haze ☁️ There was a lot of moisture in the air on the night that I photographed this rural scene in late April of this year. The purplish hue in the background sky and the disproportionate size of the planet Jupiter’s disc in this photo are effects caused by that haze. The disused grain silo on the left of the shot looks like its builders use orange-coloured concrete, due to the glow of nearby sodium anti-fog lights. For 10:00 pm on an Autumn night the fields in the distance look unusually bright as they reflect the light pollution from the city of Nowra, about 12 km (8 mi) to the west. Light pollution is a pain in my photographic neck, but sometimes it’s useful for brightening up the terrestrial elements of a nightscape photo. 👩‍🌾 🚙 Richard Tatti @nightscapeimages has told me that the silos in my state of New South Wales are markedly different from those he sees in Victoria, his home state. One of these days I’ll have to block out some vacation leave and visit Richard’s part of Australia to see–and photograph–those silos for myself. 📷 This photograph is a single-frame image that was photographed using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.
20 May 2019. (Almost) Straight Up 🌌⬆️ Today's nightscape image is one of my last photos from a long session I had on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, around ten nights ago. My first images of the night were taken four hours earlier, at this location in the lee of the headland at Gerroa. In between the two stops at Gerroa I’d driven to a few other sites, trying to find a composition I hadn’t tried before or a foreground scene that I’d not seen on earlier trips. It was close to 2:30 am when I stopped back in here, and by then the Milky Way’s band was almost directly overhead. What had been a slight breeze earlier was now a strong wind, so being up close to the cliff face provided not only this lovely view of our galaxy but some respite from the wind. ✨ I didn’t plan it to be so, but the “gas giant” planet Jupiter is positioned at almost the dead-centre of the frame. Moisture in the air and some thin cloud that was forming stole some of the colour out of the sky, rendering the stars almost all the same hue. 📷 This shot is a single-frame photograph that I shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.
17 May 2019. Bereft of cover under the cover of the sky 💨 🌳 There was a moderate wind blowing when I shot this scene last Friday night, 10th May, causing the blurring of the tree on the right-hand side of my photo. The lack of foliage on the central tree left its branches less affected by the wind, resulting in a lot of it looking sharp and still. Apart from the blue and red lights that you can see on the farm building, nothing of the rest of that structure was visible to the naked eye. 🌌 Presiding above the whole scene is the beautiful edge-on view that we have of our Milky Way galaxy, forming a majestic arch that draws the eye to its presence. Jupiter, the most massive of our solar system’s planets, is seen here as a large and slightly fuzzy white dot shining from within the Milky Way’s belt. Saturn is hiding in the top branches of the tree. Down near the horizon, particularly towards the left, the sky looks bright, as if the moon was about to rise, or the sun close to announcing itself for the day. In fact, the moon had set over three hours before I stopped here, and the sun’s rise was still about six hours away. The light that you can see is from the atmospheric phenomenon known as “airglow”. On several night trips to areas far from urban light pollution I have observed airglow so bright that I didn’t need a torch or headlamp to see where I was walking. 📷 Since I couldn’t get the whole scene in with just one photo, I shot two slightly-overlapping frames and then used some stitching software to blend them into this final single image. Here is the equipment and the settings used: Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400. I used a Litra Pro LED bank to light the foreground (and beyond).
15 May 2019. Under the weight of the heavens 🌲🌌 I have mentioned previously that I always aim to compose my nightscape photos to show a link between the terrestrial and the celestial. On Sunday night (12th May) when I visited Gerroa, Australia, I did my best to line up this young Norfolk Island Pine with the swathe of stars, dust and gas that mark the cross-sectional view of our Milky Way galaxy that we see from Earth. I aimed to make it look as if the Milky Way was emanating from the tree and up towards the zenith, with the immensity of that majesty deforming the tree under its weight. 🙏 I hope that you can see something of the divine in my images, and be inspired to get out, look up, and be enthralled. 📷 This photo is a single-frame shot that I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.
13 May 2019. Lurking In the Light 🛑 •• Make sure to swipe across to see both the clean and annotated versions of today’s image •• 🚙🌗 With the full moon less than a week away–meaning fewer hours of dark skies each night until then–and my sleep debt getting out of hand, last night was my last chance for the next few weeks to grab some more nightscape photos. I made a trip down the coast to Gerroa, about 110 km (68 mi) south of my home in Sydney, Australia, timed so that I’d arrive just as the moon was setting, at 12:01 am. 🌌 I made the most of the few hours available and captured a variety of images, including several with no landscape element in them. Today’s photo is one of those, featuring the bright conglomeration of stars in our Milky Way galaxy’s core region, plus the distinctive dust lanes and nebulae that inherent in this part of the sky. Our solar system’s most massive planet, Jupiter, is also in this area of the night sky now, and there’s no missing it in my photo. 😱😱 When I copied the night’s shots from the memory card to my Mac and fired up Adobe Lightroom, I saw that I’d caught two of Jupiter’s moons as well, hiding in the glare of their parent-planet's reflected sunlight. Of Jupiter’s total of 79 natural satellites, my camera picked up light from the two largest, Ganymede and Callisto. I reckon that’s a good result for a six-second exposure using a 50mm lens. 📷 Here is the shooting information detailing the settings and gear that I used to capture this image: Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.
12 May 2019. Sprinkles of Stars ✈️ I remember the first time I flew across the USA, back in 1990, from LA to Boston, and seeing green, distinctly circular fields. I wondered to myself, are they giant “crop circles”, or some multi-kilometre-wide art installation? They’re known as “centre-pivot irrigation” systems, also “water-wheel” or “circle irrigation” installations. 🚙 Until last Friday night, I’d never seen one up-close. Driving around farmlands east of Nowra, Australia, I was looking for some manufactured structure or other to use in a nightscape photo. The spill of light from my car’s high-beam headlamps caught the edge of one these oversized garden sprinklers, so I took a stroll into the field to see if I might be able to include the superstructure in an image. For the record, this beast is 250 metres (820 feet) long. 🌌 For this photo, I stood underneath the water-wheel and pointed the camera almost straight up, as the time of night had the Milky Way placed near the zenith. I framed the shot so that the Galactic Kiwi seems to be balancing on one of the sprinkler’s trusses, with the bright light from the planet Jupiter looking like a gem that the Kiwi has swallowed. 📷 I captured this single-frame photo using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.
08 May 2019. Light fishing ☁️ 🌟 Although about half of the sky in this shot is covered by cloud, I still think it “post worthy”. The clouds have had the effect of diffusing and brightening the light coming from the planet Jupiter–the bright orb on its own near the hill–as well as the stars of the constellation Scorpius. Antares, the brightest star in Scorpius, is known as a red “supergiant” star and you can see its orange glow up and to the left of Jupiter. 🎣 If you zoom in on the photo, you can see the lights of rock fisherman near the bottom of the scene. These guys were using glow-floats on their lines, and their little lights have scribed some green arcs in the air above the rocks. Despite the weather forecast the clouds here didn’t clear, so I headed off to a few other locations not long after getting this and a handful of other photos. 📷 This is a single-frame photo for which I used my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.