18 Jul 2019. Last one until 2021 🌖 This week's partial lunar eclipse seems like old news now, even though it's less than 48 hrs since the event. May 2021 will bring the next eclipse visible from my part of Australia, so old news or not, today's post is another image from Wednesday morning. 🚌 I often try to combine celestial & terrestrial elements in my images, to give a contrast between the eternal and ephemeral. What could be more "everyday" than a morning bus ride to work? Was there anyone on this bus, crossing the Captain Cook Bridge in Sydney, Australia, who looked out the window and saw this magnificent sight in the sky, I wonder? I assume that most of the passengers on the bus would be looking down at their devices, missing out on the world happening around them. Perhaps the driver missed it, too, looking at the road ahead & not allowing being distracted by such beauty. 📷 As you know, I wasn't missing out on the heavenly happening as I was on the beach photographing it all for you. This photo was taken by me with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 50-500mm @ 500mm @ f/6.3, using an exposure time of 1/50 second @ ISO 200.
17 Jul 2019. Partially eclipsed but totally engaging 😱 A partial lunar eclipse provided a free & fascinating show for millions around the world in the last 24 hours. Photographing this natural wonder from my location in Sydney, Australia, meant being on-site, ready and raring to go by 4:43 am, when the penumbral phase of the eclipse began. Sure, it was cold out, being winter down here, but the sky was clear, and there are plenty of other cold mornings in the year to stay in bed. ⏰ The point of maximum eclipse was tabled as occurring at 07:30, but Moonset in Sydney this morning was 07:02 so we missed seeing the best bits of this heavenly happening. Mrs Nightscapades & I were due to meet friends for breakfast, so I didn’t spend much time looking at the shots when I got back from my morning mission. Tonight after work, though, I started looking at the results more closely and found this gem. The photo shows the Moon in partial eclipse as it silhouetted the form of an inbound domestic jet on approach to Sydney’s Kingsford Smith International Airport. Bingo! 📷 For this lucky shot, I used a Canon EOS 6D camera, fitted with a Tamron 70-300 mm lens zoomed to 300 mm. I set the lens’ aperture to f/8.0, the shutter speed to 1/60 sec and used an ISO value of 200.
16 Jul 2019. R2D2's Australian cousin, under the Milky Way 🌌 For today's image, I photographed Jupiter and the Milky Way rising over the dairy lands southeast of Nowra, Australia. 💡😱 As for most of my nightscape photos, I had my camera's ISO set high enough to capture the details of the Milky Way's central band. A by-product of setting the camera to gather that many photons from the sky was that lights from passing card, plus the light pollution from Nowra itself, did a great job of lighting up the foreground. 📷 For this photo, I stacked six individual shots, to reduce noise and enhance some of the details. I used my Canon EOS 6DMk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, with an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400 to capture each of those six images.
15 Jul 2019. Northerly aspect 🚙 On the last Friday night in June, I headed out from my home in Sydney, Australia, to the southern tablelands region of New South Wales. My first stop was at a farming locality known as Big Hill, a drive of about 180 km (110 mi) from home. 🌌 With the Milky Way’s galactic core almost overhead, I pointed my camera northward to take in the view over the foggy fields of Big Hill. I’m not sure, but I think that little hill in the distance might be THE Big Hill. The few large puddles that formed the small creek in the foreground excelled at reflecting the starlight for me to capture. The Milky Way’s galactic core might not be in the photo, but there was plenty of interstellar dust-lane detail in the northern heavens to add interest to the scene. 🔭 The distinctive green hue in the sky was generated by the natural phenomenon known as atmospheric airglow. Human eyes can’t detect colour in low-light conditions, so I wasn’t able to see the greenness myself, but my camera certainly could. To me, the background sky was visibly brighter than the deep darkness that I’ve witnessed at lots of other light-pollution-free locations, and that brightness is usually a sure indicator of there being lots of airglow overhead. 📷 To create this image, I blended three individual shots in a process known as “stacking”, which helps to reduce the amount of digital noise in the final photo and also removed unevenness in my foreground lighting. For each of those three single photos, I shot with 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 3200.
14 Jul 2019. Attractive force 🌌 The total mass of our Milky Way galaxy is estimated to be about 1.5 TRILLION times that of our home star, the Sun, which is itself around 333,000 times the mass of the Earth. When I look at this photo, I instantly imagine that the gravitational force associated with these massive amounts of…mass is what’s bending the trees in towards the Milky Way and the planet Jupiter, in the middle of the scene. 🌲 In reality, the apparent bending of the trees is from the warping and stitching processes used to create the final image out of the ten single, overlapping frames that I shot at this location in late May of 2019. Through the trees in the foreground, you can see the colour and light from the sky’s atmospheric airglow being reflected by the waters of Bolong Creek, a tributary of the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales, Australia. The treetops are slightly blurred from their movement in the stiff breeze that was pushing through the area at the time. 📷 The ten original photographs that I used to make up this image were each captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, through a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.
12 Jul 2019. Corunna Reflecting 🚤 🛶 Corunna Lake is on the far south coast of my home state of New South Wales, Australia. From dawn until dusk during the hotter months of our year–October through until April–the lake’s surface is stirred by the wakes from dozens of watercraft, be they petrol, electric or human-powered boats and the water-skiers towed behind some of them. ✨🌌 Come nightfall though, and especially now during winter, it’s only the occasional splash from fish jumping that ruffles the top of the lake. With no boats, no breeze, no clouds and the moon having set earlier, last Saturday evening (July 6th) at Corunna Lake was a gift to the keen nightscape photographer. My LED lamp illuminated the rocks under the water at the lake’s edge, and the stars and atmospheric airglow lit up the sky. There was a tiny amount of movement in the water which has made the reflected stars look like they’re making a slight circular movement. My photo has captured the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds suspended above the southeastern shoreline. You can see the southern end of the Milky Way’s central band parallel to the right-hand edge of the frame. 💡 There are several other features of this night’s sky that I have highlighted for you on the marked-up version of this image, available by swiping to the left here on Instagram. 📷 I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8 to capture this scene, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.
10 Jul 2019. Mist, the Milky Way and a marine mirror 🌫 A fine and almost invisible layer of mist was hugging the surface of Tuross Lake when I sat on the small beach at Sandy Point at around 4:00 am last Sunday, July 7th. As thin as that mist layer was, the air contained enough moisture to give a milky look to the water around the red and orange navigation markers whose light demands your attention when you first view this photo. Sliding down towards the southwestern horizon, the Milky Way was displaying the glorious glow bursting from the billions of stars in its galactic core, surrounded by swirls of interstellar dust and gas clouds. 🌌 The “gas giant” planet Jupiter, named for the ancient Roman sky god, was sliding horizon-ward ahead of that marvellous mass, looking lovely and white not only in the sky but also in the wiggling white streak created by its reflection that you see stretching across the lake’s surface and right up to the edge of the sand. The red “supergiant” star Antares is another celestial character whose twinkling light was reflected by the lake’s waters. As with Jupiter, Antares’ reflection from the top of the lake made it to shore, unlike that of each of the beams from the red and yellow navigation markers. 😱 I could have cropped the top of the image down some more, but I wanted you to see two other features of that night’s sky. Almost at the right-hand edge and a little down from the top is the yellowish light from the planet Saturn. If you head left across the frame from Saturn and upwards a little, you can see a small, dark blob near the middle of the photo that looks like it could have been a dirty spot on my camera’s sensor. This little patch of darkness is a nebula that is blocking the light of the stars behind it. 📷 I shot five overlapping photos to create the final vertical panoramic image that you see here. That composite image measured roughly 5800 x 12200 pixels and consumed almost half a gigabyte of disk space! Each of those five single photos was shot with my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.
07 Jul 2019. Planet light, planet bright ✨ I hope you’ll forgive my license with the nursery rhyme “Star light, star bright”. What looks like an intensely bright star at the centre-bottom of my image is, in fact, the planet Jupiter, photographed three weeks after it reached opposition (when it is on the opposite side of the sky to the Sun) and its closest approach to Earth in its orbit around the Sun. 🌌 The next line of the nursery rhyme goes, “First star I see tonight”, or in our case, “First planet I see tonight”. Jupiter is currently the first planet–or star–you’ll see at night and is unmissable in the eastern sky as the night falls. A hint of fog in the evening air when I shot this diffused the light of Jupiter so that the planet looks bigger and brighter than it seems when we view it with our eyes. Let’s not forget the other prominent feature of this photograph, the centre region of our Milky Way, the galactic core. I’ve spent the last five days at my family’s holiday shack at Tuross Head, Australia, where the skies are amazingly dark, and there’s plenty of Milky Way to view and photograph. Well, at least there is when the rain stops, and the fog clears! 📷 This photo is a single-frame image that was captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 8 seconds @ ISO 3200.
01 Jul 2019. Not hanging around 😧 🌌 This stretch of bitumen is called “Hanging Rock Road”. I don’t know the history of its name, and when I was there at 1:30 am on Saturday, alone, I wasn’t keen on spending time to try to find out. I’m sure I was safe, but after grabbing some shots of the Milky Way and Jupiter over the treetops, I got back into my car and moved along. It’s still hard to believe that the sky was clear here because I’d been dodging fog all night and at my next stop, just 500 meters further along the Hume Highway, the fog was too thick to get any decent images of the sky. 🌫🌲 Fog or not it was good to be out under the night sky again, taking in podcasts, some music and the ABC radio nightly quiz, “The Challenge” along the way and back home again. For the enlightenment of any non-Aussies reading this, almost every tree in this photo is a classic Australian eucalypt, most notably the “ghost gum” that’s brightly lit at the front right of the shot. The tiny rectangle of white that’s way back where the road meets the night is a reflection from a speed sign. 📷 This photo is another of my favourite kind, a single-frame image with no blending, stitching or stacking involved. I captured it with 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 3200.
27 Jun 2019. Dark and beautiful 🌉 Although I lit up these trees for the sake of the photo, and there is a hint of green glow in the mist on the water over on the left of the shot, it was very, very dark, here on the boat ramp on the Tuross River near Bodalla, Australia, when I captured this scene at the beginning of June. The green glow in the mist is from a navigation warning light on the nearby Princes Highway bridge. The structure echoes and vibrates when any vehicles pass over, but there were only a couple of cars using the road during my photo session so, for the most part, the quiet was as intense as the darkness. 🌌 Such dark conditions gave the planet Jupiter (the white starlike point near the trees) and the stars of the Milky Way extra opportunity to make themselves seen in the sky during the early hours of this wintry morning. Although I’d woken at midnight to leave my warm bed & head out in the cold for this shoot, the beauty of the dark, still & quiet outdoors made that effort worth every shiver and yawn that my body could generate. 📷 For this single-frame photo, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.2, shooting with an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.
25 Jun 2019. “Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky” 🌲 🐮 I thought this quote (by Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran) to be apt for an image that links a decaying tree to the vibrant and living sky, by way of an outstretched, wizened finger. Willingly or not, this tree has featured in several of my photographs from the Bodalla region of the south coast of New South Wales, Australia. The first time I ventured into the paddock where the tree stands, I found myself facing a grazing bull, but this time had the area to myself. 🥶 ❄️ The temperature was around 3 degrees C, and there seemed to be more dew than grass on the ground, but cold, sodden socks are no barrier for a determined photographer. I captured this shot near to 2:30 am, then spent another hour shooting and finally making the 15-minute drive back to my family’s “weekender”. 📷 This photo is another single-frame image, and I shot it using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, with an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 3200.
24 Jun 2019. Me, in the mist, after midnight ✨ 🔦 It took a lot of deft footwork to get across that wooden bridge in the dark when I visited this section of the Tuross River earlier in June. This area is a Bortle Class 1 location, which means things are very dark and free of light pollution. It's so dark that I could make out the bridge's slats without the help of artificial light, using only the natural atmospheric airglow, and starlight, for illumination. That sounds very heroic, doesn't it? The reality is that although I could see without artificial light, I didn't want to chance a broken bone or a late night swim, so I used a dim LED lantern for guidance as I made my way across the bridge and back to the camera's position. 🌌 The Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy is hiding in the top of the tree to the left of the bridge, and in the sky to the right, the crimson hues of the Eta Carinae region of the sky can be seen. The light mist over the fields and the river added a special magical quality to the scene. You mightn't be able to see me too well on the bridge, on the right-hand side, near the tree on the far bank, but I promise you, I'm there. 📷 I captured this image with a Canon EOS 6D camera, fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.
23 Jun 2019. Worth the chase ☁️🚙 Back in May, when the Eta Aquariids meteor shower was at its peak, I made one of my 500 km-ish trips out of Sydney to the rural area of Goulburn, New South Wales. On the night that I shot this vertical panorama, the radiant point of the meteor shower wasn’t due to rise to a viewable position until well after 3:00 am, so I spent lots of hours chasing clear skies. My cloud-prediction app had promised clear skies in the area I was driving to, but after motoring for over two hours, I got out of my car and growled at the clouds that were overhead. There were a few spots that I visited two or three times on this night, trying to find somewhere that was clear for long enough to get some shots. 🤝 🗺 After randomly meeting up with fellow Instagrammers @geofffyf @shazzygirl and @carolc.photography , who had also been driving around looking for cloudless locations, I grabbed few quick shots of the church, then hightailed it for a new site the three had shown me on Google Maps. Although there was partial cloud-cover when I arrived, by the time I sussed out the spot and got my panoramic gear from the car, it was clear enough to start snapping away. Wind farms fascinate me, and since the Milky Way’s core was in the right place, I shot the eight frames that I used to make up this final image featuring the turbines and the stars. 😡 FYI, the bright glow on the horizon, to the left of the closest tower, is light pollution from the city of Sydney, approximately 160 km (100 mi) distant. 📷 As I mentioned already, this image is a vertical panorama, created from eight overlapping single-images. For those eight images, I used a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.
18 Jun 2019. Make hay while the Milky Way shines 🔦 That’s how the old saying goes, isn’t it? Not quite, but maybe it should. I bumped into the hay bales–quite literally–in this paddock near Nowra, Australia, back in May, while looking for gnarly trees to photograph as foregrounds for more Milky Way photos. As I wasn’t actually meant to be in the paddock–gates are for climbing over, no?–I didn’t want to turn on my LED headlamp, so was moving around carefully using a dim red LED for guidance. The range of the light wasn’t quite enough to show up the shapes of the bales, so I ended up walking straight into one of them. 📷 This image is a simple, single-frame photograph that I shot with 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.
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.