The Stone Quarry Cemetery at Taralga, in the southern tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia, received its first occupant in 1865. One of the locals buried here, Colonel Edward Twynam, served in Australia’s army in both World Wars, and is reported to have been “well-liked in the district, and considered one of nature’s gentlemen.”

Solar-charged LED memorial lamps atop some of the graves provide an eerie focal-point in my photo, and I Iike how they compete with the celestial lights above for the viewer’s attention. Stretching across the vertical centreline of my photo are the hazy-looking filaments of interstellar dust and gas that mark the central band of the Milky Way. These massive structures are only made visible by the backlighting of the hundreds of millions of stars that make up the bulk of our home galaxy. The gas-giant planets Jupiter and Saturn are keeping watch over the scene as they sit higher in the sky, at the top-right of my shot.

My visit to this site last Saturday night (14th November) almost certainly marked the end of my Milky Way Core photography season for 2020. I still have other images from the trip to edit and post, and a few months of finding other night sky features to shoot.

The photo is a single-frame image, shot with Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The central band of the Milky Way looks hazy in today’s photo due to how close to the horizon that part of the sky was when I captured the scene. Spring in my Southern Hemisphere is nearly done, bringing more hours of sunlight every day as we move closer to the summer solstice. Sadly for me, those longer days mean fewer hours of darkness in which to photograph the stars.

captured this scene at the wind farm near Taralga, Australia, a few weekends back, on what turned out to be the only cloudless night for close to a week. By the time the clouds gave way to clear skies again the Moon had begun another cycle, and its brightness was overwhelming the light of the stars, almost certainly ending my Milky Way photography season for 2020.

Jupiter and Saturn are riding high up in the top right-hand corner of this image. These two planets will move closer to each other in the sky over the coming weeks, eventually looking like one very bright star sometime around December 21.

This photograph is a single-frame image that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Assuming that the skies in your location are free of clouds, for a few days around the 21st of December this year, you will see what looks like a very bright star low in the western sky, not long after sunset. Although this brilliant orb will seem like a star, the object will be the planets Jupiter and Saturn in very close proximity to each other in the sky. The two “gas giant” planets will be practising social distancing, remaining approximately 646.2 million km / 401.5 million miles apart despite how close they seem to be when we are then looking at them.

When I captured today’s photo two weeks back, these planets who will star in December’s display still had a noticeable gap between them. You can see the glowing giants sheltering under the twisted branches of this eucalyptus tree on the ridge near Taralga, Australia.

My photo is a single-frame image that I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 8 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Another shot from my visit to the Taralga Wind Farm in NSW, Australia, today’s photo shows the dregs of the Milky Way’s core region and central-band as they were setting in the western sky two Saturdays ago. I messed up with my lighting of the tree, so it’s darker than I intended, but its silhouette shows some of its misshapen frame and the way it leans to the north.

Over on the right, you can see a transmission mast, pointing towards the lovely beacons of Jupiter and Saturn, our Solar System’s largest and second-largest planets. As well as the indistinct fuzz of the Milky Way on the horizon, the mast signifies something else that was subject to fading. The wind turbines at this farm aren’t visible in my photo, but they made their presence known by killing off the TV reception for the town of Taralga when they began service in 2015. The transmission mast–in fact, a retransmission mast–was erected by the owners of the installation to restore the service to the locals, who had green electricity to power their televisions, but nothing to watch.

My photo is another single-frame iamge (my favourite format), that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

A handful of sheep stood atop this hill, silhouetted by the lights of the rural city of Goulburn, Australia, while I photographed the starry and cloud-free sky at the Taralga wind farm in mid-November of this year. High overhead and looking like a tuft of wool, cut free and discarded by a shearer’s blades, the amorphous glow from the billions of stars forming the Large Magellanic is the standout feature of today’s photo.

The background sky is showing a purplish tint, caused by the presence of what scientists call “airglow” in the Earth’s atmosphere, which human eyes cannot see, sadly. Dark nebulae in the Milky Way show themselves as dimmer patches in the sky near the horizon, as they block the light from stars more distant than these enormous bodies of gas and dust.

I shot two overlapping frames to create this final image, using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II Digital SLR camera fitted with a Sigma 35 mm wide-angle lens. Each photo was taken using the same settings, which were a shutter speed of 8.0 seconds, a lens aperture of f/1.6, and an ISO selection of 6400.

This post is my first in nearly six weeks, due to bad weather (the grey dome that seems to follow me around), busyness in my business, Christmas, and some time away with my wife. I hope to use my photos of the night sky's wonders to bring some wonder, light, and even joy into your lives during this current circuit of the Sun.

My initial post for 2021 is from a location where I cut my teeth on digital nightscape photography in 2013 and 2014, Tuross Head, on Australia's south-east coast. Over thirty years before then, I was shooting black-and-white star trails photos at Tuross during my mid-late teen years.

This heritage-listed church hasn't heard worshippers' singing or prayers for several decades but is a landmark still beloved by locals and the region's many holidaying visitors. The narrow opening in the persistent cloud cover only lasted long enough to shoot thirty images, including eight that I used to create this vertical panorama. The portion of the Milky Way included in the photo stretches from the constellation of Carina, just above the church's spire, up through Canis Major and just squeezing in Orion near the top of the scene.

To shoot each of the eight images in the final panorama I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.5, using an exposure time of 30 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The Orion constellation is a well-known feature of my Southern Hemisphere's night skies, and the most familiar shape within the whole grouping of stars is commonly referred to here as "The Saucepan".

A few minutes after the sky had entered Astronomical Twilight last Saturday morning (March 16th), I photographed Orion as it hung low over the mountains west of Berry, New South Wales, Australia. Not only did my shots capture most of the stars in Orion, but I was chuffed to see that the Great Nebula the constellation is known for, aka "M42", was also visible. If you pinch to zoom the photo on your phone or enlarge it in your web browser, you'll see the pinkish flame-like shape of the nebula in the top-left quarter of my shot. Y

You can also see the stars Rigel and Betelgeuse at the far-left and far-right sides of the frame, respectively, and Betelgeuse's orange glow is reflected in one of the tiny pools in the lower half of the scene.

Customarily used to summon worshippers to Mass or witnesses to weddings, I can imagine this church bell also being sounded to let people know of the majesty, wonder and glory on display in the sky overhead at night. The bell tower is out of sight from the two roads that intersect as they pass the St Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church at Gerringong, Australia, but I'm sure the clanging of the lone bell can be heard in all directions.

Reaching upwards between the tower and the tree is a bright and dense stretch of stars marking out our Milky Way galaxy's central band. I caught the two "pointer" stars, Alpha and Beta Centauri, nudging the viewer's line of sight towards the Coal Sack Nebula and the Southern Cross. Higher in the sky to the right of the tower's top are the dwarf galaxies known as the Magellanic Clouds.

My photo for today is a single-frame image that I shot using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.2, exposed for 20 seconds @ ISO 3200.

After driving 100 km (60 mi) from my home in Sydney last Friday night–and then a few hours of sleep in my car–it was time to point my camera to the southeastern horizon and get my first Milky Way galactic core photos for 2021. I captured the core's glowing mass, comprised of multiple tens of millions of stars, as it climbed above the Tasman Sea off Gerroa, New South Wales, Australia.

The light from that immense conglomeration of stars is what's silhouetting the long cloud front hovering over the Sea's surface in my photo, making visible the things that humble human eyes couldn't see in the night's darkness. Reflected in the rock pool at my feet were stars of the constellation Scorpius, with Antares' distinct orange glow dominating the lower left of my shot. I was happy to capture a hint of the galactic core's glow as it reflected from the pool's surface, too.

This image is a single-frame photo that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The last image I posted here, a few days back, captured the Milky Way’s galactic core as it was peeking above a cloud bank over the Tasman Sea. I used a 14 mm wide-angle lens for that shot so that I could include a lot of foreground features, as well as a large stretch of the Milky Way. Today’s photo was shot during that same session at Gerroa, Australia, on the 16th of January, but this time I used at 50 mm lens to make the centre of our galaxy look way more massive and imposing.

Most of the light and colour that I captured in the sky here was generated by the stars, plus some atmospheric airglow in the Earth’s atmosphere. There is also a tiny amount of sunlight in my shot due to the start of astronomical twilight.

I created this image by shooting two single-frame photos that were then stacked using the program “Starry Landscape Stacker”. For each of those two photos, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.2, with an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

If you’re from the Earth’s northern hemisphere, my title for today’s post is probably confusing you. For we who dwell in the better hemisphere, though, it’s normal to see the Pleiades, the Hyades and Orion in the northwestern sky during our summer nights, as I’ve captured in my photo.

I photographed this scene at the disused St Stephen’s Church at Coila, near my holiday township of Tuross Head, Australia, in the first week of January 2021. It’s often nearly impossible to get any nightscape photos on that part of Australia’s southeast coast during the Christmas/New Year holidays, as the prevailing weather conditions seem to provide nothing but cloudy nights. I had a one-hour window in the cloud cover this night, doing my best to shoot only a few dozen images before the canopy closed over me.

The gear that I used for this single-frame photo was my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.5, exposing for 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Tuesday this week (26th Jan) was my country’s national holiday, Australia Day. I celebrated the start of the day with a nightscape photography session at my recent haunt, Gerroa, on the south coast of my state of New South Wales, Australia. A public holiday is often a great chance to sleep in, but instead, I drove 110 km and braved the 10-knot wind plus the predicted 92% cloud cover to capture as many shots as I could of the Milky Way’s core rising over the Tasman Sea.

That cloud app was wrong, thankfully, and the only wisps in the sky stayed safely out of my field of view to the north, allowing me to click off about 140 photos in the session. The International Space Station was due to commence a pass from northwest to southeast at 4:40 am, about ten minutes after the first glow of the Sun invaded the eastern sky. The darkness of the night, in concert with the angle of the ISS’s orbit, resulted in the brightest reflection I’ve ever seen shining from the massive structure passing overhead.

The streak on the photo showing the Space Station’s path is a broken line due to the slight gap between each of the nine photos used to create this composite image. To shoot each of those nine single frames, I used a Samyang 14 mm wide-angle lens, at an aperture of f/2.8. The lens was attached to my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, and I took each photo with an exposure time of 20.0 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Wow, January has finished in what seems to have been almost a blink of my eye! For my northern hemispherical followers that means the warmer months are closer. On the better side of the equator, though, our summer still in full swing, but we know that winter lies ahead.

The Milky Way’s core pops above the horizon at about 3:00 am at this end of January, leaving only an hour or so to photograph it before the Sun’s rays signal farewell to the night. That time of rising moves earlier by about an hour every two weeks, so you should expect to see more of the Milky Way in my photos, and at a slightly different angle, as February and March come and go. At the moment, with only a few weeks of the core’s visibility having taken place, a lot of my photos are looking the same.

Today’s photo of the Milky Way’s core rising as the period of astronomical twilight was beginning, was captured at Gerroa, about 110 km (68 mi) south of my home in Sydney, Australia. The glow of the Milky Way’s core of stars, planets, nebulae and dust clouds reflects off the shallow sheet of water covering the rock platform in the foreground.

As with other recent shots I’ve posted, I took several photos in succession and combined then in a process called “stacking”, to reduce the amount of digital noise in this final image. Each of the three photos I used in the stack was taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 3200.

"It was resolved on the motion of Mr J B Taylor that a committee be appointed for the purpose of building a stone Church". Extract from the minutes of the Gerringong Church Committee of 26-6-1880.

In 1882 that resolution was fulfilled with the opening of the St Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church, which I photographed under the rising Southern Cross and the starry blobs known as the Magellanic Clouds. Gerringong is a lovely town located on the south coast of my home state of New South Wales, Australia, which I visited in early January of this year. Not visible in my photo is the source of the yellow light that floods over the church and its grounds, the nearby intersection, and everything else for hundreds of metres around.

Photographing starry skies requires setting a camera's light-sensitivity–its ISO–to a number much higher than you'd use in daylight, but doing so makes every photon of light you capture seem more intense. I found it challenging to shoot the church and the twinkling skies while doing battle with the glowing monster suspended over the road. It took a lot of work in Adobe Lightroom to vanquish the venom of the overpowering orb, but I think I made good my victory.

This photo is a single-frame image, for which I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 3200.

One night in June of 2020–during one of the periods when travel within our state wasn’t COVID-restricted–I trekked to Seven Mile Beach (Gerroa, Australia) for what I hoped would be a long nightscape photography session. Sometime during the 100 km/60 mi drive, my cloud app didn’t notice the fluffy, floating mass that started to move across the sky at my destination. The canopy wasn’t covering all of the skies and did give me a few chances to capture some usable images, but it was frustrating to find that the drive was almost a waste of time.

Although the photo I’m posting for you today isn’t cloud-free, it does have an attractive look about it. The subject of the image was the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. I was shooting this lovely object with my camera mounted on a star tracker. When the camera’s shutter was open and capturing the starlight from the galactic cloud, wafts of atmospheric cloud made their way into my shot. The lights from nearby towns gave the clouds their reddish hue as they passed over.

This photo is a single-frame tracked image that I shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera fitted with a Canon 24-105 mm lens zoomed to 80 mm, with its aperture set to f/5.6. With the camera on a Skywatcher Star Adventurer tracking mount, I used a shutter speed of 68 seconds, with the camera’s ISO set to 3200.

In mid-July of 2020, I stole a few days alone at my family's holiday shack at Tuross Head, on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia. Not long after midnight on my last day of the trip, I shot the photos that make up this vertical panorama of Milky Way over Tuross Lake.

There was no hint of a breeze to disturb the water's surface, but the lake's tidal movement helped to stretch out the reflections of the stars, turning sparkling dots of light into streaks of reflected colour.

Shining conspicuously near the top of the photo are Jupiter and Saturn, still five months away from their grand conjunction in December, which I missed due to a cloud mass that parked itself over my city and covered all points within a radius of about 300 km. The glow from my camera lens' anti-dew heater battery is responsible for the red spill on the sand at the bottom of the scene, matching the navigation light's hue out on the lake.

This vertical panoramic image was created by stitching together nine single-frame photos, each of which I shot with my Canon EOS 6D camera, through a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Most of my nightscape images are composed, shot and processed with one intention in mind: I want people to go outside at night and look up. For today’s photo, though, I hope that you’ll look down and see the beauty of the stars as I captured their light being reflected in the shallow tidal pools at Black Head Point, Gerroa, Australia, in early January.

The orange star that’s glowing intently in the pool, a little to the right of the centre of the image, is the red supergiant Betelgeuse, the tenth-brightest star in our Earth’s skies and the second-brightest star in the constellation of Orion, aka The Hunter. Most of the members of Orion are reflected in the pool as well, including the blue supergiant Rigel, to the left.

The stars that make up both the belt and sword of this familiar pattern of celestial objects are seen as splashes of light between these two bright orbs.

I captured this photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, using a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4. I left the shutter open for 15 seconds and had the camera’s ISO set to 3200.

The constellation Orion–known as "The Hunter" to many cultures–was almost resting atop these three cows when I visited their outpost back on February 21st. Fellow nightscape photographer Geoff Sharpe had guided us to the unusual locals on a quiet dirt road near Harden, on the South West Slopes of New South Wales, Australia. Created by Australian artist John Kelly, the clique of cows is a reproduction of his sculpture, "Three Cows in a Pile," exhibited in Monte Carlo and Glastonbury in the early 2000s.

The background sky's green colour was provided by the atmospheric phenomenon known as "airglow", and the myriad stars on-show were delivered by the clear, clean and dark night we were afforded.

I took two photos to create this "stacked" final shot, and for both of those images, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.5, for an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Two Friday nights ago (19th Feb), I broke one of the rules (suggestions?) of nightscape photography and visited a location that I hadn’t scouted beforehand in the daylight hours. Being honest, I’ve broken this rule more times than I’ve obeyed it, and most of the time, it’s been worth it.

At 8:30 that evening, hearing my lament that there were cloudless skies at my favourite coastal location, a mere 300 km (186 mi) drive away, my wife exclaimed, “you should go!” After checking that her offer was genuine, then scrabbling to get some clothes, food and gear together, I did what I was told and drove, drove, drove for nearly five hours. That broke some rule or other about being rested before a long car trip, I think.

As you can see from my photo, the long drive; the climb down the rocky trail to the beach (more of a slide, really), and the knowledge that I would be a tad tired in a few hours was worth it for the glory of the Milky Way’s core region and these magical rock formations that welcomed me. The location is Cathedral Rocks at Mullimburra Point, Bingie Bingie (Australia), and I’m keen to visit and shoot here again soon.

I took two single-frame photos that I then stacked together to reduce digital noise. For both of those images, I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.5, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

This graveyard behind the St Mark's Anglican Church at Currawong, New South Wales, Australia, is relatively young compared to most rural resting places around our country. The oldest inscription on any burial plot or headstone at the site only dates to 1919, a little over one hundred years ago. I visited the church site in late February with Facebook-friend and fellow nightscape photographer Geoff Sharpe.

Geoff had already left the site and was on his way back to town for some sleep when I was lurking amongst the graves with my camera, tripod and LED light bank. Apart from the sensibility of getting some sleep, Geoff was also astute enough to not lose his hotel room keycard, unlike my silly self. I slept in my car for the ninety unsatisfying minutes between my return and the opening of the hotel front office.

The light from the background sky's atmospheric airglow, as well as the brightening Zodiacal Light, gave enough illumination to silhouette the landscape while my LED bank lit up the foreground. The few clouds near the horizon were polite enough to keep out of my photo's targeted region, the Milky Way's galactic core.

Per a few of my recently-posted photos, I created this image by taking two single-frame shots and stacking them in software to reduce digital noise. I once again put my faithful Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera to use for those shots, and I'd attached it to a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens set to f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Local pickled blue granite was used to build the Currawong Anglican Church, which I captured here under a dark and starry sky late in February of this year. The building is one of the finest-looking examples of rural chapels that I’ve seen and stands as a testament to the dedication of the region’s residents over the last 100 years. The church was built on land donated by one local property owner, and other family members funded the construction. When the land and building faced disposal in the late 1980s after years of disuse and destruction by vandals and thieves, the local community once again rallied, saving and restoring the buildings and grounds.

The Currawong Church was one of the shooting locations that I visited with Geoff Sharpe on the crazy weekend when I drove 1377 km to (try to) satisfy my obsession with photographing Australia’s night skies.

I took eight overlapping single-frame photos to create a vertical panorama that includes the church grounds, the beautiful building and the superb sky. For each of those individual images, I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

It's likely that Geoff Sharpe and I both had a chuckle at the irony of cows staring at the Milky Way as it rose east of Harden, NSW, Australia, when we lurked in the darkness with our cameras back in February. Cows->Milk->Milky Way. I'm a dad-joke tragic, apparently, so passing up that exercise in word-association wasn't going to happen.

I've mentioned previously that the Australian artist, John Kelly, is famous for his sculpture known as "Three Cows in a Pile". This installation of Mr Kelly's iconic work marks the access to a major pastoral company's farm in the Harden area and is one of the least-likely landmarks you'd expect to find on a dirt road in the country.

The galactic core area of the Milky Way is always an impressive natural wonder to see and photograph, so it's no wonder the cows couldn't help but gaze at it, too.

I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera to shoot this single-frame photo, coupled with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I had a multi-sensory experience when I visited this oyster farm on Tuross Lake recently. The visual component was a given, with the Milky Way rising over the hill across the lake from where the working punt was tied up. My ears were filled with the crunch of discarded shells being as I shuffled around, looking for a suitable spot to shoot from. The aroma of the rotting vestiges of oysters, still in those same shells, was something I’d not anticipated when heading to the location.

Although my attempt at lighting the little bay and the tree-covered headland across the water didn’t work out as I’d hoped, I think I still did OK at featuring the punt as floated under the core of our galaxy, moving higher up the southeastern sky.

I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera (fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, set to an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200) to create this image. I took four single-frame exposures that I then stacked in the software “Starry Landscape Stacker” to make the final photo.

Even at 22 km (13.6 mi) distant, the beacon atop the lighthouse on the island known to local indigenous people as Barunguba stands out in this image that I shot on Sunday, 14 March. Named “Montague Island” following its gazetting in 1790, Barunguba is a familiar landmark on the eastern horizon for people in this part of the south coast of New South Wales, Australia. Somewhere on my bucket-list is a stay on the island, in the former lighthouse keeper’s cottages, with some Milky Way photography as part of the package.

The Milky Way’s dense band of stars, nebulae and dust clouds stretches from the horizon up to the top right-hand corner of my photo. I also captured the intense glow of the heart of our galaxy–the galactic core–as the surface of the Tasman Sea was reflecting it on this still and clear night.

Although I could have posted this image in its single-frame version, I opted to stack two of the successive shots I captured on the night. Each of those individual photos was taken using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.5, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I remember my dad taking my brother and me fishing when we were kids and him passing on to us one of the rules of that pastime, "never tell anyone where you caught your fish." Thankfully, when it comes to the question of "where did you get that photo" I've experienced the opposite attitude from the nightscape photographers I've gotten to know on social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and a few others. The image that I'm bringing you today is a fruit of that more helpful mindset.

Two weekends back, I was near the town of Braidwood, NSW, Australia, with a clear and moonless night ahead of me, when I recalled a location that fellow nightscape nutter Ian Williams had suggested to me in a conversation a couple of years prior. I'd saved it in Google Maps back then, so I had no trouble finding the spot when I decided to shoot there on that cloudless evening. Thanks to the night's conditions and Ian's generosity, I captured several images like this one of the Milky Way rising over and reflected in the Jembaicumbene Creek. That name is VERY Australian and is as meandering as the tiny waterway that bears its title.

I shot the image with a 50 mm lens to emphasise the Milky Way's scale compared to the little creek, taking eight single-frame photos that I stacked together to reduce noise and enhance their details. For each of those eight shots, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera; a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.6; an exposure time of 6.0 seconds, with the camera's ISO set to 6400.

The Magellanic Clouds–satellite galaxies of our Milky Way–are the southern sky's dominant features in my photo for today. Also commanding the scene is the colour green, caused by an electrochemical process in Earth's atmosphere known as "airglow". The marine growth on the side of the half-sunken oyster punt has added its much-brighter shade of green to my shot.

I'd been photographing the rising Milky Way at a few locations on this night in mid-March, so I made sure to point my camera at another beautiful area of the clear, dark and windless sky. I've mentioned previously that this spot on Tuross Lake (NSW, Australia) is marked by the distinct odour of the morsels of oysters that cling to the not-quite-shucked shells. Oysters, very natural, if you don't mind!

This photo is a single-frame image that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.5, using an exposure time of 30 seconds @ ISO 3200.

At an estimated 400 million years old, the rock formations at Mullimburra Point, on Australia's southeast coast, are possibly the most ancient objects I've ever touched or clambered over. Lit up in the foreground of my photo for today is half of what's known as "Pyramid Rock". This granite formation looks to have been thrust up from below the sand on this small beach.

Astronomers estimate that the universe is at least 11 billion years old, with most experts putting it at an average of 13.8 billion years. The rocks here might be the oldest objects I've ever touched, but the wondrous universe that I love to photograph, and to stand under and contemplate, is the oldest thing I've ever laid my eyes on. For sure, looking in the mirror each morning does sometimes make me second-guess that claim, but the heavens are arguably a tad older than the reflection that squints back at me.

I used six identically composed/framed photos to create the final image that you see here to reduce the digital noise that would be visible in a single-frame shot. The settings that I used for each of those six photos were as follows. Camera: Canon 6D Mk II. Lens: Sigma 35 mm f/1.4 Art set to f/2.8. Shutter speed: 13.0 seconds. ISO: 6400.

A clear and dark night, a turning planet and plenty of free space on a memory card were the perfect ingredients to create this star-trails image that I shot last weekend. There was no breeze at ground level, but some air higher up pushed a few clouds through the area, breaking my colourful trails of light into smaller segments as they floated across the sky.

Apart from one passing car that left the bright red mark on the dark via its tail-lights, I enjoyed the peace, quiet and solitude of my few hours on this bridge over the Moruya River around midnight last Saturday night. I hope that some of you viewing this photo can have times like that to refresh and recharge your own souls.

I shot 108 single-frame photos that I combined in the free software “StarStaX” to create the trail effect that is the main feature of this image. For each of those shots, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.5, for an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 1600.

Last Friday night, 16th April, I drove out to the locality of Kiangara in the New South Wales Southern Tablelands. There has been a church building on this site since 1889, as the sign in my photo indicates. The current chapel–erected and put into service in 1904–was a worthy structure to feature in the foreground of another colourful star-trails photo. If only our eyes would let us see these beautiful hues in the stars without needing the help of a camera!

For nearly ninety minutes, my camera captured 298 photos of the old church and the much older stars in the open skies above. The combined glow from a “Lume Cube” LED lamp and the lights of vehicles passing by on the Lachlan Valley provided illumination of the church, the surrounding yard and some of the resident graves.

The 298 frames that I used to create this final composite image were captured on my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 800. After I did some editing in Adobe Lightroom Classic, the photos were exported as JPG files which I then combined using the free application, StarStaX.

Although the Milky Way, the glorious green airglow in the background sky and the beautiful bluestone church were the features that I wanted to draw viewers’ eyes to when I shot this image, I find my own gaze being drawn to the bright green streak of light on the left. Signifying the vaporisation of a tiny piece of rock as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, the flash of a meteor is a bonus for night sky photographers. The green hues of this death flash captured in my photo indicate that the vanquished visitor had a high percentage of nickel in its composition. I hope that the meteor enjoyed its view of Earth during that incredibly brief time in our vicinity.

I created this final image from eight overlapping photos, stitched together using an app on my Mac. The church and yard were lit with an LED light bank as I captured the eight shots with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

When I drove to this backwater of Tuross Lake on a clear and still Sunday night two weeks ago, I was trying to photograph the fabulous and familiar constellation of Orion before it set. Bad timing–and the irresistible urge to photograph the Milky Way as it rose opposite where I initially had my camera pointed–meant that I only captured the portion of Orion you can see in today’s photo.

The haziness of the sky near the horizon drained most of the colour from that part of the scene, but if you zoom in, you can still see the lovely pink colour of the Orion Nebula. Although Sirius–the brightest star visible in the night sky from anywhere on Earth–was too high above the horizon to include in this photo, its bright, blue-white light was shimmering as it reflected from the tidal flow of the lake.

This photo is a single-frame image that I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I don’t know what the weather conditions were in Paris on the 25th of January, 1752. Still, it’s a safe bet that the temperature on that northern winter’s day was a lot colder than what French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille enjoyed at his observatory at Table Bay, South Africa. That night, de Lacaille would make the first recorded observation of the lovely pink flames you can see in the upper right-hand corner of my photo. Known as the Eta Carinae Nebula, this 460 light-year-wide mass of gas is one of the largest diffuse nebulae visible from Earth.

You don’t need to know any of this object’s history or classification to see that its colours stand out from the multitude of stars surrounding it in my photo.

I didn’t use a telescope or star tracker to capture this image but instead shot a sequence of 19 photos using my camera on a fixed tripod. I used a Canon EOS 6D camera for each of those single frames, coupled with a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f3.2, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 12800. Following processing in Adobe Lightroom, I stacked the 19 images (10 lights and 9 dark frames) in Starry Landscape Stacker for Mac.

According to a February 2019 “Smithsonian Magazine” article, about 25 million meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere PER DAY, making my photo a one-in-25-million image! The Milky Way’s galactic core region was rising in the southeast when I pointed my camera down this narrow connecting stretch of the Tuross River earlier in April this year, snapping off 410 photos over 1.5 hours to make a time-lapse sequence that I’m yet to edit and post.

Capturing the meteor’s last flash of existence as it fell into our planet’s gaseous layers was something I only discovered after getting home and reviewing the night’s shots. I hope the meteor has a pleasant afterlife because it sure put on a good light show in its final act.

I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera to take this single-frame photo, and the camera was fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.2, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

There are several methods that nightscape photographers use to ensure that the stars in our photos are sharp–“tack-sharp” as the worn-out term goes. After several years of trying my best to get those incoming photons to be pin-pricks, it was hard for me to shoot a photo like the one I’m posting today, in which the stars are intentionally OUT of focus!

For my in-focus foreground element, I chose one of the more recent monuments in the Tangmangaroo Anglican Church’s graveyard–near Yass, Australia–with the rising Milky Way’s core blurred, but still colourful, in the background. I focussed on the distinct straight edges of the cross and its plinth, setting my lens to its shallowest depth-of-field to maximise the sky’s fuzzy look.

I used the following equipment and settings to create this image: Canon EOS 6D camera, fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.4 aperture, choosing an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 1600.

I thought I had my Lume Cube light pointed away from the camera as I was walking along this dirt road, but my photo shows that wasn’t the case. It’s been a long time since I took a selfie under the stars, and this accidental exposure will do me for the next couple of years. The Milky Way was looking glorious as it rose in the southeast, and I was using my remote trigger to shoot off some frames as I walked up to place the lamp under the tree. The green atmospheric airglow has given my photo a lovely background hue, and the haziness of this part of the sky rendered the scene with a softer look than I usually capture in such dark-sky areas.

The high-beam headlamps from a car passing northwards along the Lachlan Valley Way here at Kangiara, Australia, cut through the darkness and made my little Lume Cube appear to be lighting up much more of the landscape than the LED lamp is capable of.

This image is a single-frame photo that I shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The Magellanic Clouds–the fuzzy and bright puffs in the top half of my photo–seem to be hanging in space over these two headstones in the graveyard of the Tangmangaroo Anglican Church near Yass, Australia. These celestial siblings are known as the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, respectively, and are dwarf galaxies that travel through our part of the universe along with our Milky Way.

The light from the atmospheric feature called airglow was backlighting the scene with its bottle-green glow and was so intense that I needed to reduce its saturation when I edited the image before posting. I lit the monuments and foreground growth with some LED banks, and a passing truck’s high-beam lights shone through as I had the camera’s shutter open, giving a blue-white look to the tree and grasses behind the cross.

I shot eight single-frame photos that I then blended in both Adobe Photoshop and Starry Landscape stacker to create a final image with the foreground elements and the beautiful starry sky all in focus. Each of the eight individual frames was shot using my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Our media loves to hype up a meteor shower, and the 2021 Eta Aquariids Meteor Shower was as hyped here in Australia as it’s ever been. The Eta Aquariids doesn’t perform as well in the Southern Hemisphere as it does near the equator and further north, but I headed south last Friday night anyway, desperate to get back under the stars. My cameras shot off 380 photos over the 1.5 hours I was on Seven Mile Beach near Gerroa, Australia. For that effort and the 220-odd kilometre round-trip, I ended up with only four photos showing meteors. One of those turned out not to be an Eta Aquariid member, so my count for this famed shower was three meteors.

The bright green streak of light in this photo is the best of the four meteors that I photographed, and its position in the sky near Jupiter at least adds another point of interest. The Moon had risen only a few minutes before the photo, its golden glow looking diffused due to the light sea fog that hung around for my visit.

My photo for today is a single-frame image that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The next train wasn't due to pass through this crossing for over seven-and-a-half hours after I photographed it on Saturday night (15th May), but the signal light was in the "caution" state, per the railway system's rules. The amber-coloured beacon didn't seem as bright as it shows in the photo, which shows how much amber light was spilling over the rail corridor and surrounding farmland.

There wasn't much of note in this area of the sky last night, but I managed to capture a few significant objects in my image. You can see the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy (midway down the left-hand side of the photo), the bright star Canopus (up and to the left of the signal light), and the open star cluster Caldwell 96 (up and to the left of Canopus). If I'd hung around for a couple of hours, the view would have been better, with the Milky Way's band standing vertical at the end of the tracks.

I used a Lume Cube LED lamp to light the shot's foreground and captured the scene with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.6, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Gliding slowly and silently up towards the zenith, the centre of our Milky Way–its galactic core–provided a beautiful backdrop for the shapes and tones of the rocks that make up this southern headland at Gerroa, Australia, when I visited there last night (Tuesday 18th May). I’d driven to this location on the slim chance of being able to photograph the Aurora Australis, inspired by the intense activity of one week ago, which I missed out on due to needing sleep.

There was no auroral activity last night, though, but with dark and clear skies and no wind to disturb my doings, I shot this and some other Milky Way images, then drove north for home.

I took two single-frame photos to create this final shot, with one of those focusing on the rocks and the second one homing in sharply and squarely on the magic Milky Way. After some quick and simple edits in Adobe Lightroom, I blended the two shots in Photoshop to produce what you’re looking at now. My equipment and settings for the two original images were: Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 3200.

The green glow of squid trawlers out to sea–and over the horizon–was reflected off the low cloud bank that was slowly moving away from the coast when I captured this photo at Gerroa, Australia, earlier this week.

I framed the shot to place the planet Saturn midway across the frame. After travelling close to 1.44 billion kilometres across space (about 895 million miles), the giant world's light was reflected by the seawater in the rock pool and up to my camera. The driftwood at the water's edge added an extra foreground feature to the scene.

This photo is a single-frame image that I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.2, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

There aren’t a lot of trains that run on the southernmost section of the South Coast Line in New South Wales, so I was pleased to have been able to “catch” this passenger train as it whizzed through the level crossing on Saturday night, 15th May, with the Milky Way rising in the background. The driver had to sound the train’s horn as he approached, and even though I knew that would be the case, I still jumped when he hit the button to send the sound waves screaming forth!

Due to the brightness of the train’s lights, I shot two photos to create the final image that I’m posting here. The first shot was taken a minute or so before the train’s approach, with the camera set to catch the details of the Milky Way. After that, I quickly reduced the camera’s sensitivity so that the train’s much-brighter lights wouldn’t overwhelm the second photo. Next, I blended the two single frames in Photoshop.

I used the same camera and lens for each photo; my Canon EOS 6D Mk II DSLR fitted a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens. The shot without the train was exposed for 10 seconds, at an aperture of f/2.4, with the camera’s ISO set to 6400. For the train photo, I changed the lens aperture to f/8.0 and dialled the ISO down to 400.

With our city of Sydney, Australia currently in lockdown due to the COVID-19 Delta variant, I find it liberating to look at my night-sky photos. The images are a reminder that I’ll be back out under the stars once again–hopefully soon–breathing the fresh country air and appreciating how good life can be.

I shot this photo of the ghostly remnant of a gum tree–an Australian eucalypt–under the Magellanic Cloud galaxies when I stayed at Tuross Head, New South Wales, back in early June. The purplish tinge of the atmospheric airglow that was prominent in the sky on the night provided a lovely backdrop for the blue-white wisps of light known as the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. If you look at the sky over the top-left half of the tree, you can see some dark patches punctuating the brighter background. These disturbances are caused by a phenomenon known as gravity waves, which are not to be confused with the more enigmatic “gravitational waves” that were first detected in 2015.

Today’s photo is a single-frame image that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

On the first night of a stay at my beloved Tuross Head (New South Wales, Australia) back in April of this year, I drove to the still and shallow waterway known as Wallaga Lake for a nightscape photography outing. Although it looks like waves are breaking on the distant shore, the bright and white streak stretching across the bottom of my photo was caused by the lights of a car as it lined up to cross the lake's single-lane wooden bridge.

Through what turned out to be a haze-laden night, the Milky Way's core region commenced another of its daily climbs up the southeastern sky, flaunting its beautiful features for any who were watching. You can see the various colours of the stars, nebulae, dust lanes, and dark gas clouds concentrated in this section of our home galaxy in my photo.

I shot this single-frame photo using my 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.

I shot today's photo in June of this year during another visit to my family's holiday shack at Tuross Head, NSW, Australia. My cloud forecasting apps had convinced me to stay in for this cold and dewy night, but a quick check outside before going to bed rewarded me with a sky clear of clouds. I had seen this hay shed earlier in the year during another outing and was keen to feature it in some of my photos, so I drove there for what would turn out to be my only nightscape photo session for this long weekend. Although fogged in a few times during my visit, I was happy to see the mist clear as I set up to shoot this vertical panorama.

You can see the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy hovering low in the sky over the rear of the shed, with the bountiful band of the Milky Way stretching from the structure's front and up towards the zenith. In the end, there was a fine layer of fog higher up in the sky, which had the effect of making the Milky Way look more "milkier" than I prefer in the final photo.

I shot this image by capturing eight overlapping photos that I then stitched together using software on my Mac. For each of those single shots, I used my Canon EOS R camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

While I was shooting a time-lapse sequence of the Milky Way rising over the Moruya River (Australia) in early April of this year, I heard the faint sound of a helicopter over the valley and mountains behind me. Ever the geek, I opened the Flightradar24 app on my phone to find that the inbound was a rescue chopper coming across from the Canberra Hospital, a flight of about 100 km (60 mi). Although the airborne ambulance flew directly to the nearby Moruya hospital, its return leg saw it taking off towards the river, creating the bright arc through the trees that my photo captured.

A whisper of fog was clinging to the river’s surface, giving it a milky look to match the starry Milky Way dominating the heavens above it.

Today’s photo is a stacked composite/blend that combines six shots from the 490-frame time-lapse sequence my camera was capturing. I combined the six frames in the program Starry Landscape Stacker to reduce digital noise and enhance the photo’s clarity. Using Photoshop, I also blended the individual frames to show the chopper’s light trail as a continuous streak, rather than the broken segments captured on each photo. I took each shot using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I guess you’re familiar with the expression that a person was “green with envy” when someone else received or achieved something special that they themselves didn’t. My photo today makes me envious of someone alright–I’m envious of myself for having been able to travel and take pictures like this only a few months ago. The COVID lockdown in my city isn’t due to be lifted before the end of August, and with no certainty about that happening, I’m lamenting having to miss out on getting away for some photography.

The green colour in the sky and reflecting from the water in my photo is from what’s called “atmospheric airglow”. Sunlight hits atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere during the day, giving them a charge that they release at night in the form of light. One of the common colours that airglow gives off is green, making my photo look like I slipped with one of Lightroom’s colour-adjustment sliders.

I shot two photos–one focussed on the sky and the other set to highlight the wharf’s railings–that I blended in Adobe Photoshop to create this final image. Each of those two photos was taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

This panorama of the Milky Way arching over a long-abandoned silo in a fallow sugar cane field has been a long time coming. Located in northern New South Wales, Australia, my first sighting of the relic was in July of 2017. I didn't get the chance to photograph it until a year later, when I spent a couple of hours shooting several compositions, including this 53-image beauty. It's a little over three years since I shot those photos, and I'm only now posting the results, but I have no idea why it's taken me so long.

The trees growing through the side and top of the decrepit structure remind me of the "life finds a way" line from Jurassic Park. The nearby city of Lismore is responsible for the yellowed burst of light at the right-hand end of the Milky Way's arch.

As I mentioned already, this panorama was created from 53 individual photos, each of which I shot using my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400. My camera was mounted on a NodalNinja 3 panoramic head.

In September of 2017, fellow nightscape photographer Ian Williams invited me to visit him in Canberra, Australia’s capital city, for a night sky photography session. Following one of Ian’s nightscape workshops, we headed south through the town of Cooma, eventually stopping in one of the area’s characteristic rocky fields.

Despite the near-zero temperature, we spent a few hours making the most of the ultra-dark and mostly cloudless night, shooting as many compositions as we could before our fingers almost froze. Although I’ve previously shared other shots from that night, the image I’m posting today has been languishing in the depths of my hard drive for nearly four years.

As well as the Magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way, I included Ian and his ghostly double in my 38-frame panorama. The galaxies M31 and M33 are also in the picture but are almost washed out by the yellow light-bloom from Cooma, 26 km distant (16 mi).

Here are the settings and equipment I used to shoot each of the 38 frames that make up the panorama. Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The total lunar eclipse of 26 May 2021–aka the “Super Blood Moon”–was an event I’d been planning to photograph for around six months. As it turned out, the weather and a transport problem on the night of the event had me starting my photography after the eclipse began and at a location that offered less than ideal lighting conditions. Due to a few factors after the eclipse, I’m only now posting any photos from the night, three months later.

After totality ended, I saw on my phone’s flight-tracker app that a passenger jet would pass over my spot in the Royal National Park, so I grabbed a shot of the plane as it flew by.

I captured this photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 50 mm @ f/6.3, using an exposure time of 5.0 seconds @ ISO 1600.

I shot today’s photo fourteen months ago, long before my city of Sydney, Australia, went into our longest and toughest COVID lockdown. It lifts my soul to look at photographs and recall the beauty that’s waiting beyond our metropolis, leaving me longing for when we can travel to our country’s beautiful rural areas and once again see the people and places that we miss.

My photo shows the Pleiades, the planet Venus–the Morning Star–and the Hyades in Taurus, plus the familiar outline of the constellation Orion rising over Coila Lake at Tuross Head, New South Wales, Australia. The hint of peachy colour on the horizon foretells the imminent beginning of another day in paradise.

This single-frame photograph was captured using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 5.0 seconds @ ISO 800.

My “must edit this” folder in Adobe Lightroom has come through again, giving me this photo of the Milky Way slipping over the headland at Gerroa, NSW, Australia, that I captured in June 2018. Mars was impossible to miss as it followed the Milky Way’s band towards the western horizon, shining in its orange glory in my shot. The beach at this headland is almost devoid of sand, with pebbles, stones and shell fragments covering the area above the waterline.

Although I ended up with this (almost) square-format image, I shot 20 single-frame photos to create a four-row by five-column panorama on the night. I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera for each of those individual frames, fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

At the northeastern end of Sydney Harbour, Watsons Bay is renowned for its views of my city's most famous waterway. The sights here are excellent during the daytime or at night, even at the meeting of those two parts of each twenty-four hours, dusk and dawn.

It was before dawn on a Saturday early in June of 2020 when I drove to the bay to photograph the Moon setting over Sydney's CBD skyline. My image for today is one of the many shots I clicked off that morning as I was periodically moving my camera and tripod along the bay's promenade to get the alignment of the Moon and the skyscrapers just how I wanted them.

The photo is a single-frame image, shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 500 mm @ f/14, using an exposure time of 1/60 second @ ISO 2000.

You don't need to have followed me for long to notice that I've shot many of my images at the coastal town of Gerroa. Located 110 km (68 mi) south of my home in Sydney, Australia, Gerroa is the closest dark-skies destination that I can make a return journey to in one night.

Taking in a sweep of 180 degrees of coastline, this nightscape panorama includes the Magellanic Clouds on the left, the grand arch of our Milky Way through the centre of the frame, and three planets to add extra interest. Mars is the bright orange orb at the top-right of my photo. Jupiter is close to the horizon–and reflected off the water–at the centre. Saturn lurks between Mars and Jupiter amidst the dust lanes and star clusters that populate the Milky Way's core region.

I captured the sixty images that make up this panorama in June of 2018, sometime around 3:00 am. Each of the single frames was shot with my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The 143-year-old Big Hill Uniting Church near Marulan, in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, is one of the many rural buildings I’ve been fortunate to have photographed under a starry night sky.

When I visited the site one night in April of 2019, the air was saturated and almost raining dew on everything it wafted over. Air that’s so full of moisture means fog, and I was lucky to get the eight shots that make up this vertical panorama before there was too much mist to be missed, you might say. There’s a graveyard on the south side of the sanctuary, hidden from view in my photo, that’s on my list of sites to trek to next Milky Way season.

I shot each of the eight individual frames that make up the panorama 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.

Made bare by autumn, these spindly tendrils seemed to reach out to the faraway light and warmth of the Milky Way as it climbed the eastern sky when I visited Bolong, Australia, in May of 2019.

This image shows one of the things that leaves me in awe when I’m photographing the night sky. The trees in my photo are in silhouette because of the brightness of the starlight behind them. Those pinpricks of light that our eyes can often barely notice or resolve are streaming out luminance and colour aplenty, able to create art (in my opinion, at least) for any who go looking.

To create this photo, I shot four individual images that I then combined in a process called “stacking” to reduce the amount of digital noise present. I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera for each of those four shots, fitted with a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Today’s photo is another that I found in my “to be processed” collection in Lightroom. The image is a vertical panorama that I created from nine single-frame photos. It captures the Milky Way and the planet Jupiter sliding down the southwestern sky at Nowra, Australia.

A windless evening meant that the dark flow of the Shoalhaven River was ripple-free and happy to oblige me with a broad and dark mirror to bounce some starlight off. I missed out on photographing the setting Milky Way in this part of the sky in 2021 due to our COVID lockdown (now into its 14th week). I’m hoping for a more productive time next year!

Each of the nine photos I used to create the final vertical panorama was shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, through a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Late in October of 2019, I drove south to Nowra, New South Wales, for a nightscape photography trip. My first stop that night was on the northern slopes of Nowra Hill, where there is a cluster of telecommunications towers and the radar installation for the adjacent HMAS Albatross Naval Airport.

The aviation warning lights atop the towers are a necessary part of the facility but aren’t very nightscape-friendly, resulting in the bright red glow you see in my photo. During the forty-five minutes that I was capturing the 201 shots used to create the final image, the Earth turned on its axis by a little over 11 degrees, resulting in the streaks of light here that we call “star trails.”

To create this composite image, I shot the 201 single-frame photos with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/5.6, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200. After some editing, I composited those 201 images with the free app “StarStaX” to create the trails.

Overshadowed in my photo by the Milky Way setting, Cambewarra Mountain rises to 617 metres (2024 feet), overlooking some of Australia’s best dairy country, including the hidden gem of Kangaroo Valley. Although it was a moonless night when I visited the area in August of 2018, the tree-covered prominence can be seen clearly in my photo, lit by the stray beams of street lamps and other light sources in the city of Nowra 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) to the south.

Northern Hemisphere folk often tell me that they would love to visit a southern location to be able to see the Milky Way stretched out as I’ve captured it, at such a low angle to the western horizon. Maybe when international borders open up to tourists once again, I’ll get to see photos of our antipodean skies, taken by some of you people from the top of the planet!

I shot twelve portrait-orientation photos to create this panoramic image. For each of those individual frames, I used a Canon EOS 6D camera fitted with a Canon 40mm f/2.8 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 12800.

On a still, clear and very dark night back in March of 2021, I was blessed to be out photographing the starry band and galactic core of the Milky Way as it rose over mountains located southeast of Braidwood, Australia. Not only did I capture the glories of the stars, nebulae and dark dust clouds as they hung there in the sky, but the smooth waters of Jembaicumbene Creek provided me with a reflection of all of those wonders, too.

A gasp of ground fog hung over the paddocks away towards the mountains while the beams spreading out from my LED light banks lit the lush grass along the creek’s banks and beyond. Atmospheric airglow lit the sky with the beautiful greenish hues you can see in my photo. After missing the last 15 weeks of Milky Way season due to my city’s COVID lockdown, looking at a picture like this reminds me that there’ll be plenty more chances to shoot the majestic Milky Way when the new year rolls around.

I shot six single-frame photos that I stitched together in software to create this vertical panorama. For each of those individual images, I used a Canon EOS 6D camera fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.6, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400. The camera was mounted on a Nodal Ninja 3 panoramic head.

Captured at the same location where I shot my previous post, today’s image is a single-exposure photo of the Milky Way’s rich and colourful galactic core climbing the southeastern sky near Braidwood, Australia. I don’t think my title above does the photo justice, but there are nights when I need to stop dithering over captions and get the photo posted!

The rickety-looking timber bridge near the bottom of the frame is the place where I’d had my camera set up for a few hours already, as I shot single-frame and panoramic photos. Several nearby paddocks-worth of very noisy cows bellowed continuously to keep me company for all of that time.

Shooting info for this photo is as follows; Canon EOS 6D camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.6, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Taken in November 2019, my photo shows the three percent illuminated Moon as it set behind hills near Nerriga, NSW, Australia, less than two days after the beginning of another lunar cycle. As well as the slender crescent of this very new Moon, I captured what's known as "earthshine." Sunlight that's reflected off our planet's oceans and clouds beams back into space and illuminates the portion of the Moon facing away from the Sun.

I also caught the light trails of a passenger jet that passed over the location on its way from Sydney to Melbourne. The planet Saturn is up and to the right of those bright streaks on the left of the shot. Jupiter and four of its moons are between the jet and our Moon, all heading toward the horizon for another night.

The photo is a single-frame image that I shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Tamron 70-300 mm lens zoomed to 218 mm @ f/5.6, using an exposure time of 2.0 seconds @ ISO 3200.

In May of 2017, I photographed the Milky Way climbing up the sky over the Tasman Sea at Gerroa, Australia. The celestial wonders were reflected in the shallow pools formed by the tide rising over the extensive rock shelf that the headland is known for. Fossils dating from the Permian period were first discovered here by western scientists in 1847, and the location is still popular with amateur and professional geologists today.

The background sky’s orange-brown colour was provided by the phenomenon known as atmospheric airglow, captured well by my camera but only visible as a greyish glow to my unaided eyes. You can see stars from the constellations of Scorpius and Sagittarius reflected from the water’s surface, as well as the red beacon from a second camera that I’d set up to shoot a time-lapse sequence.

To create this vertical panoramic image, I shot six overlapping single-frame photos with my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time for each frame of 13.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

When I stand at the ocean's shore, like here at Tuross Head, Australia, I always marvel at how vast the world's bodies of water are. Then I look up at the sky and see something infinitely more vast. As the late author Douglas Adams wrote, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

Gazing at the centre of my photo, you're looking at the heart of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. At the speed of light, it would take a mere 27,000 years to travel to the black hole at the centre of that centre-point. Take some kids along for the ride, and you'd be hearing, "are we there yet?" for quite a while!

I created this photo using a process called "stacking", which combines multiple shots of the same scene to remove digital noise and improve the quality of the final image. Next, I blended the stacked output with a single photo to show a foreground with some detail in the waves. For each of the blended 19 single shots, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, with an exposure time of 8 seconds @ ISO 6400.

In less than two days from when I’m writing this, the COVID travel restrictions on our city will be lifted. Hopefully, I’ll soon be able to take a drive to places where the skies are dark and welcoming. All I need is for the weather to cooperate!

Today’s photo is from the last nightscape session I had before that lockdown began in June this year. The Milky Way’s starry band had flipped past vertical and was gently gliding towards the western horizon as I captured this scene. My LED light banks, perched atop fence posts, did a fine job of lighting the foreground, highlighting the beautiful remains of a once-flourishing tree. The headlamps of cars driving south on the Princes Highway lit the fields in the distance, and you can see the bright and bluish high-beam lights from a northbound vehicle as well.

I shot seven overlapping photos in landscape orientation to create a vertical panorama of the fields and the sky. After stitching those shots using software on my Mac, I cropped the top of the image to make it easier to view on social media. I used a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera for each of those seven single frames, fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Another of the satisfying and (imho) spectacular photos I captured near Braidwood, Australia, in March of this year, today’s post shows the Milky Way’s galactic core peeking over the distant mountains. I captured this scene a little before midnight. The photo is my attempt to convey how the serenity of the location, the charm of the long-standing timber bridge and the immensity of the heavens combined to give me one of the best photography sessions I’ve had in 2021.

The dark nebulae stretching through the section of the Milky Way that reaches up from above the core are collectively known by many of Australia’s indigenous peoples as “The Dark Emu”, from the shape that they form against the starry background.

This photograph is a single-frame image, shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/4.0, using an exposure time of 30 seconds @ ISO 6400.

After waiting the best part of four months for my city’s Covid restrictions to be lifted, and this weekend presenting the last chance to photograph the Milky Way’s core for 2021, now the weather is against me! With the forecast showing rain and heavy cloud for the next week, I’ll have to keep trawling my hard drives for unposted images. Today’s photo is one of those unseen gems, shot in July of 2018.

Mars was bright and orange on this night, dominating the upper left-hand corner of my photo. The gas-giant planet Jupiter is diagonally opposite Mars, hovering over the light bloom coming from the city of Canberra. Hanging low in the sky in the bottom-left of the scene are the Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies and year-round features of the southern hemisphere’s night sky. The Milky Way’s central band, including its galactic core, stretches up from the tree-line towards the top-right of the vertical panorama.

The location for this photo was on Braidwood Road near Nowra, Australia. I photographed 54 overlapping images to create the final image, shooting each of those single frames with my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

In May 2021, people in many parts of the world viewed a total lunar eclipse, including me here in Australia. My photo for today is a composite of nine frames from that event, shot with my DSLR camera while it was attached to my Skywatcher Dobsonian 8” telescope.

In less than two weeks from now, we’re going to be treated to a partial lunar eclipse. Don’t let the adjective “partial” deter you from trying to view or photograph this one, though. The Earth’s shadow will cover 97% of the Moon’s face, which is very close to a total eclipse of our planet’s rocky companion. The event will begin on 19 Nov 2021 at 06:02:09 UTC.

You can learn where this eclipse will be visible using the link at the end of this paragraph. If you’re viewing my photo on Instagram, you’ll need to type the link into your web browser manually, but it will be clickable on other social media sites. There’s a box on the page where you can input your own location and see specific information for where you’ll be. https://bit.ly/eclipsenov2021

Due to the exposure time and camera’s ISO settings being different for each of the nine shots in my photo, I haven’t included my usual technical info here.

In December of 2018, the comet 46P/Wirtanen made a close pass to Earth, coming as near as 12 million km to our planet. Sure, if you had to drive that distance in your car, 12 million km isn’t really “near”, but in the realm of astronomy, we almost bumped into each other!

I’ve seen plenty of better photos of the comet than the one in today’s post, but for a single-exposure shot taken with a DSLR and a 24 mm lens, I think I did OK. The comet’s green colour indicates that the heavenly traveller contains large amounts of cyanide/cyanogen and diatomic carbon molecules. This visit was close to Christmas, so I preferred to imagine the comet being a lovely green Christmas bauble.

Captured at St David’s Anglican Church at Burrawang, Australia, my photo was taken using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I've seen swathes of excellent photos online of Friday's lunar eclipse (early evening on 19th November in my time zone). With my location–my whole state–covered in clouds for the entirety of the event, it's been great seeing how it appeared for those with clearer skies.As the title of today's post says, I'm jumping on the eclipse bandwagon, bringing you a photo that I shot during a previous lunar eclipse.

Captured at Gerroa, Australia, in July 2018, my image shows the totally-eclipsed Moon sharing the frame with the planet Mars and a portion of a satellite trail. The eastern sky was starting to brighten due to the coming sunrise–still about 30 minutes away–so the night sky's black was morphing to a more daylight blue.

My photo is a single-frame exposure shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 161 mm @ f/5.6, using an exposure time of 1.0 seconds @ ISO 3200.

While one camera was facing east to capture a time-lapse sequence of the Milky Way’s core rising over the Tasman Sea, I hurried to the road that runs atop the levee across Wallaga Lake, Australia, to photograph heavenly gems in the western sky.

Although the view to the east was clear, a sheet of high-level cloud was diffusing the starlight over the lake, rendering the twinkling suns as bright orbs rather than the pinpricks of light ordinarily visible. The constellation Orion was already halfway over the hills to the west, and the brightest star visible in the night sky, Sirius, was a glowing blue-white blob higher up in the heavens. If you zoom in, you can see the purple glow of the Orion Nebula lighting the clouds, and to its lower left, the red supergiant star Betelgeuse scraping the top of a distant rise.

A single-frame image, my photo was shot using a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 8 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The ancient and vast form of our Milky Way galaxy was rising in the south-eastern sky near Yass, Australia, when I photographed this scene at the Tangmangaroo All Saints Church in April 2021. A truck heading northwest on the Lachlan Valley Way made its presence known as its super-bright headlights illuminated the countryside, and my LED banks fought back as they lit the crumbling monuments in the overgrown graveyard.

I created this image by combining two photos that had differing focal points. The first image was captured with the lens focusing on the background, and for the second shot, I ensured that the monuments were the sharpest features of the frame. Blending the two images into this final scene was done in Adobe Photoshop. I used the same camera and settings for both photos, namely my Canon EOS 6D camera, fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/3.2, using a 13-second exposure @ ISO 6400.

These cows were outside the meadow, it turns out, but I figured I’d steal that nursery-rhyme line for my title. One of my favourite formats from the nightscape photography genre is what’s known as a vertical panorama. I’ve previously posted a photo or two from this shoot I did with my friend Geoff Sharpe back in February of 2021 but still had this composition waiting in the wings.

The quirky cows perched on the verge–and on each other–next to a rural road near Harden, Australia, seemed like a suitable choice for my vertical pano of the Milky Way rising into the early morning sky. The green atmospheric airglow and the rising core of our home galaxy seemed to hold the cows’ attention quite well.

I shot seven overlapping single-frame images that I blended in software to create this final vertical pano. Each of those individual shots was captured using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

A windless night and clear skies provided ideal conditions for creating this image of the Milky Way laid out parallel to the horizon in the Jerrawangala National Park near Nowra, Australia. Seeing our galaxy laying level like this, over the Australian bush, with the still water of the pond underneath, reminds me of what a blessing it is to be able to stop working, take some time out and appreciate the beauty of Creation. The bright, white starlike object at the top right is Jupiter, again dominating the heavens with its glory. Jupiter was one of the first delights I enjoyed when I bought a telescope over 40 years ago, and I still smile when I look at the night and see its beautiful beacon beaming forth, even in the light-polluted city where I live. This image is known as a “stack”, created by taking multiple photos in a short period and combining them to remove digital noise to enhance the view. Each of the ten single-frame shots was taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

While waiting for the Sun to set last Friday night–in my vain pursuit to photograph Comet Leonard–I snapped this image of the 96% gibbous moon as it rose over Black Head Point at Gerroa, Australia.

Clouds moved in from the west not long before sunset, robbing me of the chance to capture the comet, but I enjoyed the night out anyhow, being my first trip out of my city limits in six months.

The image is a single-frame photo, taken with my Canon EOS 7D camera, a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 191 mm @ f/32, using an exposure time of 1/50 sec @ ISO 400.

Welcome to 2022! That’s a late welcome, I know, but I mean it all the same. After a ten-day holiday with my wife and friends, then getting waylaid by Covid on my return home, I’m happy to be back to my passion, bringing you the wonders from above.

Shooting nightscape photos wasn’t a priority for our driving holiday through Australia’s Snowy Mountains. However, I still stole a few hours to get out and try to capture Comet Leonard, the heavenly traveller that’s received much attention over the past month. It’s only now that I’m back and some of the Covid “brain fog” has cleared that I’ve had the time and concentration to process the shots I took.

Today’s photo was shot on Monday, 27th December 2021, and is a stack of sixteen images showing the comet low in the western sky over the fields near Tumut, Australia. I was very excited seeing the comet and its tail showing up on my camera’s preview screen, I can tell you! I shot sixteen individual photos to create this final stacked composite image, using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

My title’s a little misleading, I guess. It’s not that I haven’t seen this part of the sky before–it’s a common sight in the evenings of our Australian summer. The location that I shot at, on the southeastern outskirts of The Australian rural town of Tumut, was somewhere new for me. This particular scene with the Magellanic Clouds, the Coal Sack Nebula, and the central band of the Milky Way over the lonely Tumut Plains Road was an unfamiliar view.

I usually put a lot of effort into avoiding power lines in my shots, but in this case, I think the lonely pole and its delicate black strings across the starry sky add interest to the composition. I plan to revisit Tumut in 2022. With the offer of accommodation at the home of one of my cousins very much open, picking the right time to visit will probably come down to the weather and having an available weekend.

This photo is a single-frame image, shot with my Canon EOS R camera, a Canon 16 mm f/2.8 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

How could I pass up the chance to bring you another of the images of Comet Leonard that I shot right at the end of 2021? I could only see the comet as a faint streak in the sky, even using averted vision, where you view an object by not looking at it directly. That unaided view was nothing more than a hint of how wonderfully my camera would capture the light from this visitor that won't return to our planet's skies for another 80000 years or thereabouts.

There were only two nights when I could get out for some nightscape photography during our recent driving tour of the Snowy Mountains and Canberra regions of my state of New South Wales, Australia. Happily, I got shots of the comet on both nights, and this one was from the second night at Tumut, NSW.

I created the image by shooting 19 individual frames and combining them using the "stacking" process, reducing digital noise and enhancing the scene's overall clarity. I shot each of those single photos with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera through a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.2, using an exposure time of 8 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I was sure I’d charged my “Lumecube” LED lights before heading out to get some night shots while in Tumut, Australia, in late December. No matter how long I pressed the On button for though, I couldn’t get those little lights to shine. Rather than turn my car around so its front parking lights would give some glow to my foreground, I let the rear–and very red–parking lights do the job. That wasn’t a wise move, so I hope this photo will come to mind the next time I toy with letting rip with the red!

In the upper-middle part of the photo, it seems the red light from my car has spilt onto the sky. The crimson tinges are from the Eta Carinae Nebula, an area of dark and bright gases located about 8500 light-years from Earth. The Southern Cross is hovering over the left side of the tree on the right of my photo, pointing down towards the midline of the scene.

I shot this single-frame photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera through a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.2, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

With my seven-day Covid isolation now into its tenth day, I've not been able to get out and capture new nightscape images. Looking back yesterday at what I'd shot in 2021, I saw that on January 16th last year, I'd visited the rock shelf at Gerroa, Australia, to try to photograph the Milky Way's galactic core before sunrise. Sifting through the images that I hadn't already posted from that outing, I found a couple of shots that looked like they'd stitch together well into a square-format picture.

The galactic core was rising behind the cloud bank off the coast, its brilliant cauldron of millions of stars lighting the sky as a forerunner of the imminent onset of twilight. The waves breaking at the edge of the shelf were glowing blue from the presence of bioluminescent organisms, adding to the wonder of the moment.

The two single frames that make up this stitched image were taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera through a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I was fortunate to capture a meteor’s glowing streak in the dead centre of this image when I shot it in May of 2021. Out on the horizon, you can see the green glow from a small fleet of squid-fishing boats, their lamps shining in all directions and lighting the bank of clouds above them. Above the second and third trawler lights, Saturn was slowly climbing the sky. You can see its glow reflecting across the surface of the ocean pools between the shell-laden beach and the line of breakers.

The tendrils of dark interstellar dust and gas between the Milky Way and the top of the frame give the sky an untidy look as if dark cobwebs had built up to blot out the starlight behind them.

This photo is a vertical panorama that I created from eight individual images. Each of those eight frames was shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.2, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I reckon this photo could be a scene of Steven Spielberg’s classic film, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” The mysterious oncoming light in the distance, the Milky Way stretched out above and the boom gates pointing skywards hint at something cosmic and strange. Given how few rail services run on this line, you’d probably have more chance of seeing an alien spaceship than a train, I’d say!

Captured near the rural town of Berry, Australia, my photo combines elements from the hobbies of my childhood–railways and space–and from my later teen years when my interest in photography germinated. Clear and quiet nights like this one in May 2021 are an excellent chance to revel in the moment and enjoy making some art.

I created this vertical panorama by shooting seven overlapping photos that I stitched in software on my Mac. Each of those individual frames was shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The Moon was two days from its “full” phase when I captured this scene at Gerroa Headland, on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia. Look closely, and you’ll notice there are stars in the sky, despite the blue and daytime look of the image. Moonlight is simply the Sun’s light reflected from the Moon’s surface, and its rays are affected by the same “Rayleigh scattering” process that makes our cloudless daytime skies blue.

Shining above the horizon on the right of the shot is the planet Venus, which was visible in the early evening sky when I took this photo in December last year but is now the “morning star” for those up early enough to see it.

The equipment and settings I used for this photo are as follows: Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera fitted with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/4.5, using an exposure time of 30 seconds @ ISO 800.

Sunday night of last weekend (3rd April), I went out for my first nightscape shoot of 2022. Being in Covid isolation while I had it, then my son and finally my wife, contributed to being stuck at home, but by far, it has been the cap of cloud over my part of Australia that did the most damage to my plans. We’ve had our entire year’s average rainfall already!

Getting out to shoot was liberating, even if the forecast of cloudless sky missed the mark a little. The green atmospheric airglow that night was pumping, evidenced by the colour of the sky in my photo and its reflection in the rock pools here at the Gerroa Headland, Australia. I sure hope I’ll be out again soon for more nightscaping.

I shot six overlapping landscape-orientation frames to make this vertical panorama using my Canon EOS R camera, a Canon 16 mm f/2.8 lens @ f2.8, with an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Although Easter Sunday in Australia this year marked the coming of the full Moon, there seemed to be some bites taken from the orb as it rose over the Tasman Sea, at least from my spot near the local landmark, One Tree Hill at Tuross Head.

Earth's natural satellite's full and familiar face was unveiled once our planet's rotation made the Moon seem to climb higher up the southeastern sky, its shimmer lighting the faces of the few dozen people who'd come to watch the event on this holiday evening. Although I prefer photographing the night sky when the Moon is less present, I still enjoy trying to capture magic moments like this to bring to you.

My photo is a single-frame image taken with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 50-500 mm f/5.6 lens @ 500 mm @ f/6.3, shot at a shutter speed of 1/15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The conjunction of Jupiter and Venus on May 1 this year was undoubtedly a sight to get up early for, or in my case, to still be awake for. Although I was staying at my favourite coastal town, Tuross Head (Australia), for the weekend, it was cloudy there on the night of April 30, so I drove to clearer skies, stopping at the lovely Cottage Beach on my way back to bed.

Venus and Jupiter were so close to each other in the sky that they show here as one very bright star-like light, so bright that the surface of the Tasman Sea reflected it. Mars and Saturn are also in the shot, and I was lucky to be treated to the flash of a meteor near where the Milky Way’s galactic core is located in my photo. A column of light passes through the Venus-Jupiter position, taking in Mars and Saturn along the way and finishing up near the Milky Way’s centre. This phenomenon is known as the Zodiacal Light, sometimes called the “false dawn”.

This image is a single-exposure photo that I captured using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens @ f/3.5, using an exposure time of 30 seconds @ ISO 6400.

This railway station at Holts Flat, Australia, saw its last passenger service pass through in March of 1975. Opening in 1921, the line to the rural town of Bombala was deemed financially unviable and eventually closed by our state government. Many of the original rails and sleepers remain in place, rusting and rotting into memory.

At 991 metres above sea level (about 3250 feet), this area sees its share of cold weather. When I visited the lilliputian location on April 30, there was ice coating the entrance gate to the ruins and relics, so I put on an extra layer of clothing, “manned up,” and spent an hour shooting the stars.

Alpha and Beta Centauri, the Southern Cross and the Coal Sack Nebula are featured around the centre of the photo. You can see the Large Magellanic Cloud hanging over the hill behind the station, and the whole scene is coloured green from the presence of atmospheric airglow.

I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera (fitted with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8) for this photo. The exposure time was 30 seconds, and the camera’s ISO was 3200.

As tempted as I was to stay the night on the rocky beach at Gerroa Headland (Australia) after finishing a Milky Way photography session, I left this airy B&B for someone else to shelter in, should they want to. I’d spent nearly five hours here anyhow, without the winds that often haunt the location, so I headed home at what was an early hour for me.

On the left side of my photo, you can see the orange streak of a meteor’s death flash, broken by some clouds near the horizon. The swathe of the Milky Way’s central band stretches from the lower left to the upper right of the frame, dominating the shot with its bright core region near the centre of the frame.

This photo is a blend of two images, one focusing on the sky and the other on the timber tent. I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera for each of those two shots and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

“They don’t work in the dark, and neither do our wind farms.” So went the declaration by one of Australia’s national politicians in 2021 when offering reasons our country shouldn’t move to renewables-based electricity generation. The “they” being referred to were solar farms, and for the most part, it’s true that once the sun goes down, a solar facility stops generating electricity. As my photo from the Boca Rock Wind Farm in New South Wales, Australia, shows, wind farms do work at night, their turbine blades shifting in response to air movements.

As well as causing the turbine to rotate, the wind on this last night of April 2022 blew a layer of high and thin clouds across part of the sky. The presence of this airborne moisture diffused the light from the stars on the left side of my shot. Typically showing as pinpricks of light in photos, the Southern Cross, Pointers and many other starry features here look like fuzzy orbs of colour. As much as I love shooting with cloudless skies, I think the moisture in the air has added a nice touch to the scene.

I took six single-frame shots to create this vertical panorama. The gear and settings for each photo were the same: a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

In 2020 & 2021, Covid lockdowns kept me from going on as many nightscape photo treks as in previous years. The first four months of 2022 here on the east coast of Australia were cloudy and wet, and then I got ill, so I've made even fewer treks with my camera in the year's top half.

On one of my rare trips this year, I shot this image of the Milky Way rising over Piccaninny Beach at Potato Point, New South Wales. The white glow from a lone ship beyond the horizon shows the line between the ocean and the heavens, while the richness of the Milky Way's central hub tells of the wonderfully dark skies on offer when you can get well away from the big towns and cities where many of us live.

To create this image, I shot five individual frames that I stacked in the Mac app, Starry Landscape Stacker, to reduce digital noise. Each of those single photos was captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The June full moon rising over Jibbon Point at Bundeena, Australia, where we don't follow the northern hemisphere's conventions for full moon events, like this month's "Strawberry Moon'." The reason is simple: our seasons here are six months offset to those in the planet's northern half. The Strawberry Moon was so-named by the Algonquin Native American tribe in the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada, and describes the short strawberry harvesting season in the region, in the northern spring. The only thing close to strawberry about this full moon for me was the pink look of the clouds.

Down here, this month's full moon was simply the June full moon–a boring but accurate name. It was a "supermoon," though, adding some extra interest. I find most full moons worth viewing or photographing, be they strawberry, chocolate or vanilla!

I shot this single-frame photo of the full moon using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 500mm @ f/11, using a shutter speed of 1/125 second @ ISO 400.

A Qantas 737 on final approach to Sydney's Kingsford Smith International Airport rides over the rising Supermoon of June 2022.

Photographed from Oak Park, Cronulla, Australia with Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 500mm @ f/8.0, using a shutter speed of 1/400 sec @ ISO 800.

With an online name of "Nightscapades," you'd be right to think that my astronomical photos would all be shot at night. Indulge me with this image that I most definitely shot in the daytime, through my 8" (200mm) Dobsonian reflecting telescope. The photo shows our local star, the Sun, sporting several unmissable sunspots. (I wonder if, on other stars, like Betelgeuse, they're called "betelgeusespots").

Caused by intense magnetic field concentrations on the Sun's surface, sunspots often generate solar flares and other energetic bursts that result in beautiful auroral displays here on Earth.

I captured this image with my Canon 7D camera, attached to the prime focus of the telescope I mentioned above. The exposure time was 1/500th of a second at ISO 100.

With the weather people forecasting clouds for the upcoming full Moon of July 2022–a “supermoon”–it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to photograph our planet’s natural satellite as it rises over the east coast of Australia. That being the case, I created this collage of images from the supermoon that occurred in June of this year.

My 13-year-old camera and 19-year-old zoom telephoto lens did a fine job of capturing shots of some aircraft lining up on their approaches to Sydney’s Kingsford Smith International Airport, with the full Moon as a backdrop. Considering how much planning I do to get night sky photographs that don’t include the Moon or aircraft, it was satisfying to shoot some images that included both of those intentionally.

The six individual images in the collage were shot with a Canon EOS 7D camera, a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens zoomed out to 500 mm and set at f/7.1, with the camera's ISO at 1600.

On the only cloudless night of a recent trip to the south coast of New South Wales–our last night before heading home–I got lucky with clear skies & the chance to shoot some nightscape photos. After grabbing some sleep between dinner & the setting of the Moon at about 12:30, I drove 30 minutes south from Tuross Head to Corunna Lake. A popular and busy water-skiing location by day, the waterway was still, serene and deserted when I arrived.

I'd come to shoot the Milky Way low in the western sky over the lake but couldn't pass up capturing this superb southern view with its colourful reflections of stars on the water's surface. In the centre and near the bottom of my photo, you can see the squiggly images of "The Pointers", the stars Beta and Alpha Centauri. The unmissable orange reflection of the star Gamma Crucis stands out from the other mirrored lights on the lake on the left of the photo, with the source of these colourful streaks–the Southern Cross–hanging in the sky a little above the tree line. Near the left-hand edge of the photo, I captured the crimson hues of the Eta Carina Nebula as it scraped over the tree tops, and you can see the town of Bermagui's lights shining off the low clouds in the south.

I shot this single-frame image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.6, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano (aka "Hunga") erupted on January 15th this year, I didn't consider that its ash cloud would still be doing laps of our planet many months later. However, the purplish hues in this morning twilight photo that I shot at Tuross Head, Australia, in early July are evidence that the aerosol particles released by the volcanic eruption six months ago are still floating around above the Earth.

Poking through that purple are several stars and constellations familiar to people worldwide. Hanging in the sky at the centre of my photo is Orion, with the hazy blob of M42–The Orion Nebula–clearly visible. On the left-hand side of the scene, I captured the constellation of Taurus and the inverted vee of the star cluster known as the Hyades, with the bright orb of Venus hovering over the pine trees below that feature. Sirius, the brightest star visible in the night sky, balances the picture as it glows almost as brightly as Venus, but over on the right. The star cluster M41 shows as a few speckles up and to the right of Sirius.

This photo is a single-frame shot captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 1600.

A privilege of living in the Southern Hemisphere is being able to look up at a cloudless, dark night sky and be treated to seeing the two dwarf galaxies captured in my photograph, the Magellanic Clouds. As their name suggests, this pair of white wafts appear to be small clouds hanging in the heavens, and indeed that's what I thought they were the first time I noticed them, many decades ago. Travelling through space with our Milky Way galaxy, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are 163,000 light-years and 206,000 light-years from Earth, respectively.

On the night I captured this scene (back in mid-April of 2022), a massive amount of atmospheric airglow lit the Earth's atmosphere. Although my camera captured the sky's green tint, this electro-chemical phenomenon made the heavens appear greyish-black when I looked up—human eyes don't see colours well in low-light conditions. Adding to the green theme of my post for today, I also captured the verdant beacons of two marine navigation lights positioned in Tuross Lake, marking out the edge of the waterway's main channel.

I shot twenty-two single-frame images that I then stacked in the Macintosh app "Starry Landscape Stacker" to minimise digital noise in the final photo. Each of those photos was captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.6, and an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 3200.

With three meteor showers at or near their peaks and all close to each other in the sky, I headed south to Gerroa, New South Wales, last Friday night, 29th July. Despite all my planning and preparation–including charging more camera batteries than I would need for even two nights of shooting, let alone one–I came home with only three frames that included flashes from the pesky atmospheric flameouts.

I’ve included the best of the three photos in this post, the last 186 frames taken on the night. Although I visited Seven Mile Beach at Gerroa as I’d planned, I made a stop at the railway level crossing on O’Keeffes Lane near the town of Berry before returning home. Jupiter dominated the northeastern sky, and the railway tracks looked seductive as they reflected the light spilling from a nearby farmhouse, so I positioned my tripod next to the line for this photo. Sometime during the twenty seconds that the camera’s shutter was open, a meteor disintegrated in the Earth’s atmosphere, showing up as a bright streak in my picture, in a line roughly between Jupiter and Mars.

Despite my relative lack of success on Friday night, I’m pleased with this photo’s composition and how it links the hobbies of my youth–astronomy and railways–in a lovely scene from a clear and quiet night.

This photo is a single-frame image captured with my Canon EOS R camera, a Canon 16 mm f/2.8 lens @ f3.5, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I hope the builders of this wooden wonder had fun putting up their little structure on Seven Mile Beach near Gerroa, Australia. The steeple of sticks served as an interesting foreground feature for this photo of the Milky Way suspended in the cloudless sky last Friday night. As noted in a few recent posts, I visited the beach to try to capture shots of meteors that were part of the Piscis Austrinids, Southern Delta Aquariids or Alpha Capracornids showers around this date.

Knowing that photographing meteors is a hit-and-miss proposition, I made sure to get photos of a few other night sky features, including the megastructure that is the Milky Way’s galactic core and central band, so I wouldn’t go home empty-handed. The bright glow on the horizon on the left of the photo is light spilling from the regional city of Nowra, 19 km (11.8 miles)distant.

I captured this single-frame photo with my Canon EOS R camera, fitted with a Canon RF 16 mm f/2.8 lens @ f4.0 using an exposure time of 30 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I thought the boom gate at this railway crossing near Berry, Australia, looked like it was raised in salute to the Magellanic Clouds as they passed overhead during a recent late-night visit. My meteor-hunting expedition on this night hadn’t been as successful as I’d hoped, so I visited a few locations and got photos of other parts of the sky. As it turned out, not long after I took this shot, I got a decent image of the railway tracks and a meteor.

I took two photos to create this composition, which I then blended in Photoshop. For the first shot, I focussed on the stars, and the second on the boom gate, to get a final image that was sharp overall. For both frames, I used a Canon EOS R camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/3.5, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The sky and foreground landscape look reasonably bright and colourful in this scene I photographed in April of 2022 at the Boco Rock wind farm near Nimmitabel, Australia.

Unfortunately, the night was so dark I couldn’t see that I had my camera pointed at a cloudy section of the western sky. It wasn’t until I began editing my photos that I saw the brown haze caused by high-altitude clouds nor the grey shapes of other clouds closer to ground level. It took a lot of editing to draw some brightness and colour out of the original shots that make up this fourteen-frame stacked photograph. Maybe you can make out the shape of the constellation Orion in the photo, with the flaming torch-like glow of the M42 nebula at the top of the composition.

Looking at the image on a screen larger than a mobile phone might help you make out the crimson arc of “Barnard’s Loop”, an emission nebula stretching approximately 300 light-years of space.

As mentioned above, this photo was created by shooting fourteen single frames (10x lights and 4x darks) that I then stacked in the Mac application, Starry Landscape Stacker. I shot each of the 14 frames with a Canon EOS R camera, a Canon 50 mm f/1.8 lens @ f2.2, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

In early July this year, my wife and I had a five-night stay at Tuross Head, on the south coast of my state of New South Wales, Australia. After dinner on the final night, with my weather app predicting a cloudless night, I drove to the edge of Tuross Lake, ensured I was warm and slept in my car for a few hours. My phone’s alarm did its job and woke me a little before moonset at 12:45 am when I prepped my camera gear to shoot the Milky Way as it slid down the southwestern sky.

With plans to shoot at a couple of locations, I didn’t bother to get out my special mount to capture a panorama. Instead, using the tried-and-true method of estimating how much overlap I had between the frames I’d later use to stitch this final composition, I snapped away and got the shots I needed. There was auroral activity on this night, and you can make out the faintest of red glows on the left, where the Milky Way’s arch touches the shoreline trees.

My panorama was created from eight single-frame photos using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, with an exposure time of 25 seconds per shot @ ISO 6400. The panorama was stitched in Adobe Lightroom Classic.

Amateur and professional astronomers rate the sky’s darkness at an observing site using the “Bortle Scale.” Places with a Bortle number of 9–the worst you can get–are overwhelmed with an excess of artificial light that blocks out all but the brightest astronomical objects such as the Moon, the planets, bright satellites and a few stars. Sadly, most of the world’s population lives under such disappointing night skies.

At the other end of the scale, Bortle 1 sites are prized locations, offering naked-eye views of galaxies, star clusters, atmospheric airglow and many wonders rarely seen by the masses. The shooting location for today’s photo, Tuross Head on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, is ranked a Bortle 2 destination, with skies almost as dark as you can get here on Earth. A windless, still night like I had when I shot this photo in early July 2022 means you also get to see and photograph reflections of the heavenly highlights on a watery surface. Tuross Lake did a fine job of quietly mirroring the lights above it. The pink glow from the Aurora Australis, active for a few hours on this night, added extra colour and beauty to the scene.

I took eight almost identical photos to create this final stacked image, with the stacking process helping to remove signal noise generated by a digital camera’s electronics. My Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera did an excellent job capturing the images with an attached Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens set @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

On the last night of April 2022, I spent several hours photographing the heavens near Nimmitabel, Australia, covering a round-trip distance of over 500 km (310 mi) for my efforts. With 75 km to travel before returning to my weekender at Tuross Head, I stopped at the Cuttagee Bridge to shoot the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter. The brightest objects visible in the night sky after the Moon, these two planets appear as one white orb hovering over the bridge in my photo, with their combined brilliance reflecting strongly off the surface of Cuttagee Creek.

Also brightening the pre-twilight sky was the Zodiacal Light, its photons coming from sunlight scattered by dust between our Solar System’s inner planets. This ghostly glow is prominent in my picture, stretching almost vertically from the Venus/Jupiter point up through Mars and Saturn and continuing to the top edge of the photo’s frame. Seemingly backlighting the whole scene, but occurring only a hundred or so kilometres up in the Earth’s atmosphere, the phenomenon of atmospheric airglow was the source of the limelight tones in the sky and also reflecting from the little creek’s waters.

Surprisingly, capturing so many astronomical wonders in one scene only required a single-frame image, using my Canon EOS R camera, a Canon 16 mm f/2.8 lens @ f2.8, with an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I don’t often shoot with a fisheye lens, so when I fit one of these optical oddities onto my camera, I do my best to photograph a scene that makes the most of the rounded view. The stonework and grounds of St Mark’s Church at Currawong, Australia, look marvellous when photographed with most lenses. Still, I enjoyed having the chance to create this single-frame scene of the Milky Way stretching across the western sky over the building, courtesy of my 7 mm lens.

After nearly nine years of shooting nightscape photos with digital cameras, I’m still learning techniques others have mastered in much less time. Getting the foreground lighting right is one of those skills that I continue to struggle with, and I might well have lit the church too much in this photo, but I’m mostly happy with the result.

Although I could have gotten away with a single photo to use for this post today, I decided to stack three frames, shot in succession, to enhance the final result. I captured each of the three shots with a Canon EOS R camera, fitted with a TTArtisan 7 mm f/2.0 lens @ f2.8, using an exposure time of 30 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The amount of background noise present when you’re taking photos rarely makes a difference to how the shots turn out, but I much prefer not to have the distractions of traffic and other city sounds when I’m creating images. Bleating sheep and chatty frogs provided the soundtrack for my nightscape session when I recently visited St Mark’s Church near Young, Australia. Shooting photos on a quiet and cloudless night is an activity that refreshes my soul & mind!

The glorious band of the Milky Way lays parallel to the horizon in the early hours of late August in my part of the Southern Hemisphere. Contrasting that natural beauty with the striking structure of this century-old sanctuary was an excellent opportunity worth feeling tired from the following day.

I messed up my focus a little when taking the twenty-two shots that make up this stacked image, so the starry sky is not as sharp as I’d hoped for. Each of those not-so-perfect single frames was captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Two point five million light-years away from Earth lives the object known as the Andromeda Galaxy, aka M31. The first known written record of this “island universe,” as galaxies were once known, is from the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, in 964 CE, when he described M31 as a “nebulous smear” or “small cloud” [Wikipedia]. One of the most famous galaxies, Andromeda is home to around 1 trillion stars and is visible to the unaided eye depending on the time of year and the observer’s position north or south of the equator.

Another 0.8 million light-years distant again is M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, a mere try-hard with only around 40 billion stars to boast of. M33 is on the edge of naked-eye visibility due to its extra distance from Earth and smaller diameter than M31.

I’m happy to have been able to photograph both of these galaxies during my recent visit to the rural area around Young, NSW, Australia, where there’s little light pollution and dry, stable air at this time of year. The Triangulum Galaxy is a mere smudge in my photo, looking like a blurred star, while M31 is unmissable as it hangs low in the sky over the garden on the grounds of the Iandra Chapel.

One night I’ll get to photograph the Andromeda Galaxy through a telescope. On this late-August night, though, I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera fitted with a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.6, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400. I captured eight exposures of the sky and another eight “dark frames”, which I stacked in processing for noise reduction.

The Milky Way’s lapdogs, the dwarf galaxies known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, were nearing the top of their daily circuit around the south celestial pole when I photographed them last week. After a long session of photographing the Milky Way low in the western sky, I stopped to capture this windmill against the starry background, less than a five-minute drive from where we were staying near the city of Orange, in regional New South Wales, Australia.

Despite almost no breeze at ground level, the wind whispering past the windmill turned its rotor fast enough that the blades appear semi-transparent, letting you see through them to the pinpricks of light far off in space. The soothing green hues of atmospheric airglow add to the agricultural theme of the scene.

This photo is a single-frame shot captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400. I lit the foreground with a single Lume Cube LED lamp.

On my recent holiday in the central-west region of my home state of New South Wales, Australia, I paid a late-night visit to this cemetery to photograph the Milky Way descending the southwestern sky. Located a little outside the town of Carcoar, the burial ground has been the resting place of deceased locals since the second half of the nineteenth century. The township is currently home to only around two hundred residents and is barely visible as you drive along the nearby Mid-Western Highway. It’s ironic, then, that at one time, Carcoar was in the running to be Australia’s national capital. The Australian National Trust has classified the entire town as a place of historical significance.

Carcoar bills itself as “The Town That Time Forgot,” but based on the number of bunches of flowers and memorial lanterns left atop several graves in the yard, I think this village’s departed residents are very well remembered indeed.

This photo is a single-frame image that I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera fitted with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400. I used two Lume Cube LED lamps to illuminate the monuments.

Ideally, I should have waited another hour or so to shoot this photo of the Milky Way hanging in the western sky over the dam at Carcoar (NSW, Australia) to improve the balance between our galaxy’s band of stars and the curved structure below. The weather forecast predicted clouds moving in by that time, so I captured a few shots before moving on to another location.

The dam wall’s full width was covered in a water curtain that plunged to the valley below, providing an agricultural flow to the Belabula River and the surrounding countryside. Above the landscape, the astronomical phenomenon known as the Zodiacal Light can be seen in my image, brightening the sky diagonally in the left-hand half of the scene.

My favourite style of nightscape shot is a single-frame image, and today’s post is another example of the genre. I captured this scene using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

With Milky Way core season just about over for 2022 and half of the Australian continent presently living under skies that are delivering rain ranging from drizzling to pouring, the image I’m posting today is likely my last Milky Way panorama capture for the year. My wife and I had a short stay near the rural city of Orange, Australia, in late September, and only the last night of the trip was clear of clouds, despite things having been grey and ugly for most of the day. We’d visited this canola farm a few days earlier on the only sunny day of our break. I saved a pin in Google Maps in case I might have the chance to visit during canola season in coming years, not expecting the weather to oblige me this time. A layer of thin cloud was hugging the horizon on my arrival. Still, with that expected to clear within the hour, I experimented with my two Lume Cube LED banks, doing my best to illuminate the canola plants for the right effect. After seeing some of my nightscape photography heroes produce some inspiring photos of canola under the Milky Way in the past few years, I’m pleased to have done OK with this one of my own.

The signage on the truck in my photo says, "Compost for Soils. Nitro Humus." I'm sure the stars don't need any fertilising, but the thought of having a truck full of chemicals to make the sky look lusher has a comic appeal. The vivid green field to the left of the road was planted with canola & was only a few weeks from bursting into the vibrant yellow that this region is known for in the Australian spring.

On the day I photographed this scene, in late September, a persistent canopy of grey clouds didn't bode well for a session of nightscape photography. Happily, the clouds cleared an hour after dark, and the Milky Way's band of stars, dust lanes and nebulae showed themselves as they eased towards the southwestern horizon near Cowra, Australia.

This photo is a simple single-frame exposure, captured 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 6400.

After capturing the Milky Way setting over the canola fields north of Cowra, Australia, in late September, I turned 180 degrees to see what the eastern sky offered. As we move towards summer here in Australia, our skies will have a different roll call of celestial features for photographers to contemplate and capture, so it’s good to look to the east now to see what’s ahead.

The Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxies were on the upward segment of their daily circle around the South Celestial Pole, two puffs of light in a relatively featureless area of the southeastern sky. Aldebaran, the red giant star in the constellation Taurus, was only a small way above the horizon, over on the left of the scene near the white burst of light from a car’s headlamps. Electrically energised particles in the Earth’s atmosphere lit the sky with their green glow, providing a fine match for the fields of pre-bloom canola prominent in this photograph. On the horizon to the right of the trees flanking the road, you can see the purple glow from a thunderstorm battering my home city, around 220 km (136 mi) distant.

I shot this single-frame photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, matched with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I'm disappointed to have taken so long (a week is almost an eternity in the world of social media) to make my first post from last Tuesday's total lunar eclipse. A combination of the busyness that comes with being self-employed; some health problems; and a list of around-the-house jobs that needed attending to all kept me from editing and posting any photos until now. In hindsight, I could have stayed at home in Sydney to photograph the eclipse from my balcony since the clouds where I'd driven to–Seven Mile Beach, Gerroa–thwarted my plan to capture shots of the eclipsed Moon peeking over the horizon. I set my camera's intervalometer to grab sequential shots of the Moon at five-minute intervals. You can see how the eclipse progressed to totality as the Moon climbed the northeastern sky. I used my Canon EOS R camera fitted with a Canon 50 mm f/1.8 lens to shoot the photos that make up this composite image, employing a range of shutter speed and aperture settings.

It’s been too long since I posted a night sky photo! Today’s shot is from the last nightscape photography session I had–aside from the night of the total lunar eclipse in early November–at the end of September. We were staying near the regional city of Orange, Australia, where you don’t have to travel far to find dark, light-pollution-free skies. The house we were minding was only a ten-minute drive from the centre of Orange, and I captured this scene another five minutes down the road from there, on my way back from a long photography session.

Shot with a 24 mm wide-angle lens, the photo displays a stretch of the sky with several prominent southern-summer sky features. Near the left is the open star cluster, the Pleiades, aka “The Seven Sisters”, showing many more stars than its name suggests. To the right of the Pleiades is the upside-down “v” that outlines the Hyades cluster in the constellation Taurus. Aldebaran is the brightest star in this constellation, seen glowing at the bottom-right of the inverted “v”. Almost directly below Aldebaran is the planet Mars, easily mistaken for the red giant star but definitely not as far away from Earth. A little right of the centre of my shot is the constellation Orion, with its famous M42 “Orion Nebula” showing itself conspicuously in Orion’s sword. Sirius–the brightest star visible in the night sky–and its parent constellation Canis Major, complete the string of stellar features near the right-hand side of the frame.

To photograph this nocturnal scene, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, utilising an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

When I visited Seven Mile Beach at Gerroa, Australia, to photograph the total lunar eclipse of November 8th, 2022, I was treated to another natural wonder. As totality approached, I saw that the breaking waves looked brighter than the rest of the water and wrote it off as being due to the moonlight making them stand out.

It's a tad embarrassing to admit that it took me a few minutes to realise that the purpose of driving 110 km to be on this beach–seeing the Moon's light dimmed by the Earth's shadow–meant the waves had to be glowing for another reason. Of course–bioluminescence! Now I was torn. Should I stop shooting the eclipse to shoot some frames of the glowing waves or keep clicking away at the heavenly sight?

Today's photo is evidence of my choice to pivot my camera to capture the beautiful waves as the constellation of Orion rose in the east and the light from Sirius, the sky's brightest star, reflected from the horizon to the water's edge. The single-frame photo you see here was shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

November's total lunar eclipse was an event that left me with a cache of images still to process. Today's photo is a single-frame shot from that night, captured when the "totality" phase was in full effect. To the unaided eye, the Moon was barely visible in the sky, with all of the direct sunlight that usually gives us a full Moon being blocked by our home planet. I have increased the photo's exposure to show you the red-brown hues refracted onto the Moon by the Earth's atmosphere, giving rise to the "Blood Moon" moniker.

The lack of bright moonlight made it possible to see faint stars that would usually be lost in the Moon's glare, and I captured some of those in the shot. Also visible to my camera was the ice-giant planet Uranus, which you can see arrowed in the photo.

Welcome to 2023! Although today’s photo was shot in late 2022, I still think it’s appropriate for this time of year. It’s summer here in Australia, when plenty of people spend nights on beaches, taking in the sound of the ocean, sitting near a fire and enjoying time with family and friends.

For you people in the colder half of the world, my photo can help you look forward to thawing out as the Sun moves up towards your latitudes and hints at the warmth and life that spring and summer can bring. I wish you the very best for 2023 and hope you get plenty of opportunities to get outside, look up, and take in the wonder.

This photo is a single-frame image, shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera attached to a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens zoomed to 64 mm @ f/8.0, using an exposure time of 5.0 seconds @ ISO 400.

Sometimes I imagine how the night sky would look to us humans if our eyes could see the nuances of colour and light that digital cameras can capture. Human eyes are limited in how many colours they can detect in low light, so what looks like a black or charcoal-grey night sky is often full of colour from atmospheric airglow. The pinpricks of light that we call stars and glowing nebulae in space might all seem white, but there's a range of beautiful hues beaming throughout our universe.

My photo for today has captured some of those unseeable colours by combining multiple time exposures in a process known as "stacking." You can see a range of greens in the background (actually, they're in the sky's foreground here), indicating the presence of airglow in the Earth's atmosphere. Moisture in the air in the form of high and thin clouds shows itself as an orange smear in my shot, and close to the centre of the scene are the lovely crimson hues radiating from the Eta Carina Nebula.

Tuross Lake was smooth and still when I sat on one of its beaches to shoot the component photos for this image in April of 2022. You can see the green airglow reflecting off the water's surface and silhouetting the lake's southern shore.

For each of the nineteen images I took to create this final scene, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.2, utilising an exposure time of 13.0 seconds @ ISO 3200. After processing the images in Lightroom, I used Starry Landscape Stacker to combine the individual frames into the final result I'm showing you today.

The best-known feature of the night sky in my part of the world is the Southern Cross in the constellation Crux. Featured on the flags of five nations, the “Cross” is an asterism–a pattern of stars that make up a familiar shape and include stars from other constellations. Where I live in Sydney, Australia, the Southern Cross is a “circumpolar” feature of the night sky, which means that it never sets below the horizon.

At the bottom of the image are the two brightest stars in the constellation Centaurus, namely Alpha and Beta Centauri. The common name of this pair of lights is “The Pointers” because you can use them to find the Southern Cross. Most of the items that are captured in my photo are naked-eye visible. I shot several photos in succession to bring out more sky features, resulting in you seeing the contrast between the Milky Way’s dark nebulae and dust lanes versus the billions of bright stars.

I created this detailed image by shooting twenty-one single-frame images edited in Adobe Lightroom and then stacked using the Starry Landscape Stacker application. The shooting information for each of those single images is as follows:

Camera: Canon EOS 6D Mk II
Lens: Sigma 35 mm f/1.4 DG Art
Exp time: 10 sec
Aperture: f/1.8 ISO: 1600
Light frames: 11
Dark frames: 10

I guess this is barely a “nightscape” photo since the Sun hadn’t set when I shot it, but I think a touch of artistic licence is allowable. On the night of the total lunar eclipse (8th November 2022), I arrived at Seven Mile Beach, Gerroa, with time to spare before the event began so I could get my cameras in position. While the sky was still bright from the sunlight, I captured a few shots of the Moon rising over Gerroa Headland, 4 km (2.5 miles) from where I sat on the sand. Although the Earth’s shadow had started to darken the Moon’s surface, the difference wasn’t yet visible, with or without the clouds that intermittently blocked my view.

The “forced perspective” effect from using a long focal-length lens has made the Moon seem much more prominent and closer than it looked to me and, no doubt, to the people watching it from the headland.

This photo is a single-frame shot, taken with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens zoomed to 500 mm @ f/6.3, using an exposure time of 1/100 seconds @ ISO 400.

On the last weekend of April 2022, I visited the coastal town of Tuross Head (Australia) for a weekend of photography. On Saturday afternoon–the last day of the month–I studied weather and cloud forecasts, then set off for the Boca Rocks Wind Farm, around 210 km away and at an elevation 1075 metres (3526 feet) higher than my coastal accommodation.

With daylight saving having ended a month prior, astronomical twilight began at 6:45 pm, allowing hours of shooting at the wind farm’s Class 1 Bortle dark skies. Almost as soon as I pressed the trigger button on my camera’s remote to capture this shot, a car crested a hill on the nearby rural road and lit up the turbines brighter than my LED banks could ever hope to do.

The Magellanic Cloud galaxies were showing themselves brightly against the dark sky, and close to the horizon on the right-hand side of the photo you can see a reddish glow shining through the thin clouds to the south. I checked several Facebook aurora group pages and confirmed that the glow picked up by my camera was the northern edge of the Aurora Australis.

I captured this single-frame image using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

About 28 kilometres (17.4 miles) north of the town of Young–the Cherry Capital of Australia–is a sizeable heritage-listed homestead called Iandra (that's a capital "i' at the start of the name, not an "L"). Constructed between 1880 & 1910, the building on the estate is known to locals as "Iandra Castle." Just 535 metres south of the castle proper is the estate's chapel, built of sandstone with a prominent flèche (spire) that makes it easily visible from the nearby Iandra Road.

After scouting the location in daylight, I drove back to my hotel in Young for a few hours of sleep. With this evening being the third and final night of my stay in the town, I made sure not to sleep through the multiple alarms I'd set. After my snooze, I returned to the church site to shoot several different compositions that included the chapel and the setting Milky Way core, as well as some stacked photos of the Andromeda Galaxy that I've posted previously. The strong breeze that had cleared the sky of clouds upon my arrival persisted, giving some movement to the churchyard's trees, which show in my photo as blurry shapes contrasted with the clean lines of the chapel's walls and roof. Above and to the right of the flèche, you can see the crimson hues of the Lagoon Nebula, aka M8.

I shot this single-frame photo with my Canon EOS 6D camera through a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200. For foreground lighting, I used two Lumecube LED lamps.

You don’t always have to stay up late to take nightscape photos. Sometimes you have to get up early instead! If you want to photograph the Milky Way’s core rising at the beginning of the calendar year here in the Southern Hemisphere, you go to bed at a reasonable time and wake up to your alarm disturbing you in the small-numbered hours of the morning. Today–Thursday, 26 January–I did just that to capture my first Milky Way core photos for 2023.

For the next few nights, I’m having a short break at Tuross Head, on the southeast coast of New South Wales, Australia, where getting to locations like this one means a five-minute drive rather than one of my usual multi-hour expeditions. The end of astronomical twilight was officially twenty minutes away when I shot this scene, but the hint of peachy hues near the horizon suggests that my timing might not have been right. You can see the brilliance of the Milky Way’s core reflecting off the Tasman Sea, slightly above and to the left of the man with the bare and shiny head.

I shot this single-frame photograph with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera through a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Late in January, I spent a long weekend on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, taking in the sights, relaxing after a busy start to 2023 at work and, of course, making photographs. My friend and fellow photographer Ian Williams was also staying on the coast, and at his invitation, I spent the night with him at his father’s home, only twenty minutes drive from where I was staying.

The Glasshouse Rocks, sedimentary formations that dominate the south end of the beach, are popular subjects for landscape, nightscape and drone photographers. Ian had produced some beautiful images at this beach a few nights before, and I’m grateful to him for opting to take me there so soon after his previous visit. We started shooting shortly after 3:00 am, capturing plenty of shots under the area’s dark skies and twilight and post-sunrise landscapes.

The photo I’m posting today is a composite that features the pink and peachy colours of the early twilight; the Milky Way’s galactic core and the Dark Emu (as recognised by Australia’s indigenous peoples); the lighthouse on nearby Montague Island/Barunguba beaming its photons between the two Glasshouse Rocks; the planet Mercury peeking over a cloud bank out to sea, and the Magellanic Cloud galaxies, visible on the right-hand side of my photo. The International Space Station (ISS) was passing over the southeast of Australia during our time on the beach, and you can see its light trail below the Magellanic Clouds. Despite having an orbital speed of somewhere near 25000 km/hr (15500 m/hr), the ISS moves across the sky slowly when viewed from the ground, and I had to shoot seven 30-second photos to capture this small portion of its arc across the heavens.

Each of the seven photos I took to create this final composite image was captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera through a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/4.0, using an exposure time of 30 seconds @ ISO 6400. I layered and masked these photos in Adobe Photoshop to create the continuous trail of the ISS.

As much as the dark of night enchants and entrances me, there’s something serene about seeing the stars in the twilight sky at either end of the day. After spending the hours between 3:00 am and the beginning of astronomical twilight imaging the Milky Way against the clear and dark skies at Narooma, my friend Ian Williams and I began shooting the glows and hues to be seen only in the change from night to morning.

The lighthouse atop Barunguba (Montague Island) kept true to its 15-second rhythm, caught here in my photo shining between the two large Glasshouse Rocks, and several stars were still visible against the glow of the brightening sky. The light of the planet Mercury reflecting off the beach’s wet sand made me gasp when I looked at my camera’s preview screen once the shutter had closed. Often difficult to see due to its proximity to the Sun, Mercury is our solar system’s smallest planet and makes one orbit of the Sun every 87.9 days.

This image is a single-frame photo captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera coupled with a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 6 seconds @ ISO 1600.

Nearly everything you see while looking at a cloud-free night sky is in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The Moon and the naked-eye visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) are neighbours of our Earth in the Solar System. Beyond these local friends, every star–from bright Sirius to those only visible using averted vision–is a more distant member of our local community. You can count the naked-eye objects located beyond the solar system on one hand (even a Simpson’s hand).

Two of these extra-galactic companions are visible year-round from where I live in the Southern Hemisphere. Named for the explorer on whose round-the-world voyage western eyes first saw them, the “Magellanic Clouds” are dwarf galaxies travelling with the Milky Way as we orbit in the Local Group of galaxies. I photographed the wispy wonders in the pre-dawn sky at Narooma, Australia, in late January 2023.

To create this scene, I shot fifteen single-frame photos (10x light and 5x dark, for those who care) and used the app Starry Landscape Stacker to reduce digital noise in the final image. For each of those individual shots, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.2, opening the shutter for 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

#During this coming week (Sun 26th Feb), the planets Venus and Jupiter will appear very near each other in the western sky after sunset. At their closest, the two shiny dots will be separated by about half of one degree, close to the apparent diameter of the full Moon.

Today’s post is an image I shot on 1st May 2022 at at Cuttagee Beach, on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia. On this occasion, the meeting of Jupiter and Venus took place in the morning sky, before sunrise, and the two white lights were a mere 0.2 degrees apart as viewed from Earth, which is less than half the gap of this week’s alignment.

Mars and Saturn were also visible on this morning and, like Jupiter and Venus, were flanked by the band of white known as the Zodiacal Light. You could also see the Milky Way’s central band stretching from the northeast horizon and up towards the zenith.

To create this vertical panorama, I captured 7 overlapping single-frame photos, each in “landscape” orientation, using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.5, with each shot exposed for 25 seconds @ ISO 6400. After editing each frame in Adobe Lightroom, I used Autopano Pro to create the final panoramic composite.

Seeing the close conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in tonight's post-sunset sky was a treat after so many days of grey clouds, showers and the occasional thunderstorm recently. The apparent separation between these two planets was only 0.5 degrees–roughly the full Moon's width as seen from here on Earth. The actual separation was a mere 645 million kilometres (400 million miles) or so, but as I looked at them, they seemed like friends hanging out together.

My photo caught the planetary pair setting over the old fisheries research buildings at Hungry Point in Cronulla, Australia. If you pinch to zoom in on your phone or enlarge the picture to full-screen on your computer, you can see three of Jupiter's moons stretching up and to the right of the orb. I heard on a podcast this week that recent discoveries have brought the total count of Jupiter's moons to 92. Considering how that number keeps increasing, Jupiter will soon have more Moons than there are Marvel movie sequels!

For this single-frame photo, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera attached to my 17-year-old Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 313mm @ f/5.6, using an exposure time of 2.0 seconds @ ISO 800.

The title of today’s photo comes from what I said when I saw the image on my camera’s preview screen, standing on the beach at Glasshouse Rocks, Narooma, Australia, in late January. My shooting companion, Ian Williams, was elsewhere on the beach capturing stunning compositions of his own and likely being just as wowed upon seeing what his camera had rendered.

I shot this scene using a 50 mm lens to give a sense of the immensity of the Milky Way against the foreground features, and I think I achieved that goal. There’s always a hazy look to the sky the closer you get to the horizon, so being able to bring out the wispy filigrees of the dust lanes and dark nebulae that characterise our galaxy’s centre presents a challenge. To help draw out those finer details, I shot with a high ISO setting (the camera’s sensitivity to light) and took eleven consecutive photos that I then stacked during processing. The onset of astronomical twilight was only ten minutes away when I shot my eleven-frame sequence, and you can see a hint of orange already colouring the sky behind the hill.

I took each of the eleven frames used to make the final composite image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.5, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 12800.

I’ve had only two opportunities to photograph the night sky so far in 2023. Since some of the shots from those outings were similar, today’s post is from my “Work in Progress” album in Lightroom. Captured on May 1st, 2022, on my way home from an overnight session, my photo shows the Milky Way standing almost vertically over the road bridge at Cuttagee Beach on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia.

Apart from a gorgeous beach that’s met by the outflow of Cuttagee Lake, the location offers very dark skies during moonless nights, allowing you to see and photograph myriads of stars and the wispy dust lanes, nebulae and other features sprinkled throughout the Milky Way’s central band. Although our eyes can’t detect the colours of the night sky’s atmospheric airglow, my camera had no problem seeing and recording the green hues present on this night. The airglow was so bright it silhouetted the few clouds drifting low in the southwest sky.

To create this vertical panoramic image, I shot ten overlapping landscape-format photos that I stitched using the Autopano Pro app after editing in Adobe Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, and Topaz DeNoise. Each of the ten frames was captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Visit Corunna Lake in the daytime, especially on weekends during Australia’s hotter seasons, and the water will be abuzz with ski boats, fishing boats and leisurely canoes. A night-time visit during our winter months offers almost no sound or motion other than from the wind ruffling the water’s surface, the shrieks of possums fighting in the trees that encircle the lake, and the shutter clicks from a nightscape photographer’s camera.

That quieter atmosphere was what I sought when I parked my car on the boat launching ramp at Corunna Lake in early July 2022 at about 4:00 am. After taking some test photos and readjusting my tripod and panoramic mount, I shot the 44 frames that made up this 2.3 GB image of the Milky Way setting in the southwest and reflected off the water. I used a Lume Cube LED lamp to light the foreground (which took a LOT of test shots to get right), and it did well to illuminate the weed-covered rocks and show the boat ramp disappearing under the water.

I shot the 44 single frames used to create the panorama using my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.6, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Since 1881 the lighthouse on Barunguba (Montague Island) has cast its photons all around to warn of its rocky location, and you can see the light on the horizon here on the left side of my photo, some 22 km (13.6 mi) to the southeast of where my camera tripod stood. To my eyes, at least, the sky looked like a shimmer of white pinpricks sprinkled on the black velvet noticeboard in the heavens. As you can see from this image, that expanse was more mauve than black due to atmospheric airglow doing strange things with electrons high above the Earth.

Looking up and to the right of the lighthouse in my shot, the deep crimson floral burst of the Eta Carina nebula dominates the night. A few of the many dark nebulae of our Milky Way were doing their best to block the starlight coming from behind them in the right-hand half of the image. The wonderfully dark night skies here at Tuross Head provide the simplest but richest astronomical experiences for anyone who’ll look up, even without binoculars or a telescope.

I photographed this scene at 5:30 am on a winter night in July of 2022, using a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8 attached to my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera. I opened the camera’s shutter for 13 seconds and set its ISO to 6400.

The Eta Aquariids meteor shower happens in May each year and is one of those astronomical events that the press and media all seem to have stories about, telling us how good it’s gonna be. One night in May of 2021, I sat on the sands of Seven Mile Beach at Gerroa, Australia, shooting a time-lapse, hoping to capture some of the flashes of fairy light. Of the 312 shots in my sequence, only six caught any meteors.

Before packing up and making the 110 km drive home, I took a few simple images of the Moon as it rose over the Tasman Sea. In this shot I’m posting today, the sunlit portion of the Moon was a fat crescent. The Sun’s light reflected off the Earth’s clouds and seas, known as “Earthshine”, lit up the parts of the Moon where, you might say, the Sun didn’t shine. If you zoom in on the photo, you can make out some of the Moon’s seas in the earthlit portion of its orb.

Shining green from the chemicals mixed within it, a fisherman’s glow-float was lying on the sand, giving another point of interest to my composition. Piles of foam, frothed up by recent storms along the coast, stretched along the beach like dirty meringue atop a vast dessert.

This photo is a single-frame shot captured with my Canon EOS 6D camera and a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I hope the rest of 2023 is better for me for shooting nightscape photos. I've only had three sessions so far, for which I'm thankful, but illness, weather, and personal and family commitments have kept me from spending nights doing what I love.

One of those three outings was in January at Narooma, on the south coast of my state of New South Wales, Australia. I was privileged to be led to this spot on the beach, at Glasshouse Rocks, by fellow nightscape shooter Ian Williams. We spent around four hours on the beach, shooting the Milky Way's core—while Barunguba's lighthouse shone its beam towards us every 15 seconds—until sunrise and beyond.

I know today's image is similar to those I've already posted from that night, so I'm hopeful for some clear nights when I revisit the locale next week.

I shot seventeen frames in succession for today's photo, then stacked the images in Starry Landscape Stacker after some processing in Adobe Lightroom. Each of those seventeen shots was captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera coupled with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

I’ve seen plenty of “Shut the gate” or “This gate must be kept closed at all times” signs when travelling in rural locations, but this one on a farm gate near Moruya, Australia, was a first for me when I came across it last night. Sure, the sign won’t win any prizes for poetic excellence, but it’s short, simple, practical and a nice nod to the Aussie sense of humour.

As you can see from my photo, the sky was alight with the green hues of atmospheric airglow. I intentionally focused my lens on the sign and used a shallow depth of field so that the stars and sky were blurred. I’ve long admired photos in this style by a friend and fellow nightscape photographer, Richard Tatti. Using abandoned farm equipment or even items like an old kids’ tricycle for his sharply focused foregrounds, Richard has mastered the art of making the out-of-focus night sky a beautiful backdrop for his eye-catching images. You can see how Richard works his magic here: https://bit.ly/thetrike

I shot today’s photo using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.2 and an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200.

It would have been amazing seeing this week’s total solar eclipse from Exmouth in Western Australia. From my location on the southeast coast of Australia, though, the event was a partial eclipse, meaning the Moon’s path between the Sun and my viewing position only obscured a small portion of the Sun’s disc. Unfortunately, the eclipse was partial for me in another sense. Clouds covered the sky for nearly ninety of the one hundred and twenty minutes of the eclipse.

When the clouds thinned out, I got a few images, including this one shot at the point of maximum eclipse. The clouds gave the Sun its mottled look and possibly made this a more interesting photo. In the enlarged inset, you can see the sunspot area known as AR3282, and the two large blobs at either end of this feature are about the same size as the Earth.

I’d hoped for better–and more–shots than I captured, but something’s better than nothing, right? I captured this photo with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera attached to my SkyWatcher 8” Dobsonian telescope—with a Thousand Oaks solar filter fitted—using an exposure time of 1/160 second @ ISO 800.

From my home in Sydney, Australia, at 34 degrees south latitude, seeing the Aurora Australis is a near-impossibility. Last weekend, though, I was holidaying about 300 km south of Sydney (186 mi) at 36 degrees south in a dark rural area. I put aside my plans to photograph the rising Milky Way core when I learned that the aurora was photographable from my location. This outburst had started around 24 hours earlier, but due to a cloud-covered sky, I missed not only the beginning of the display but also the peak that happened around 5:00 am before dawn. This was a legendary event from the photos and videos I've seen.

I captured the tail-end of the same show on Monday night, 24th April 2023, which was still good enough for this first-timer. The coloured lights weren't naked-eye visible, but my camera had no trouble capturing the fancy photons. My idea of trying to capture the aurora in the sky, and its reflection in the local attraction known as the Blue Pool, paid off.

I shot this image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera attached to a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.2, shooting with an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Perhaps because I live in an area of my city of Sydney, Australia referred to as "The Shire", my mind went straight to the world of the Hobbits when I chose to edit and post this photo. I think the lush grass, striking trees and bumpy track wouldn't be out of place in that other Shire.

The Milky Way was making its way up the southeastern sky near Bodalla, Australia, when I photographed this scene using a fisheye lens on the 20th of April, 2023. The Magellanic Clouds, companion galaxies of our Milky Way, can also be seen in my image near the pair of trees on the right of the shot. Adding to the scene's "Hobbitness" is the sky's deep green hue due to atmospheric airglow.

I photographed this fantasy world scene as a single shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens @ f/5.6, using an exposure time of 49 seconds @ ISO 12800. Due to the high ISO, I needed to use a noise-reduction tool while processing the photo, so I tried the new AI Denoise tool in Adobe Lightroom Classic. I settled on 35% noise reduction after seeing that 50% took too much detail from the image and 15" barely removed any noise.

Did you know that the Moon has horns? Despite having been keen on astronomy since my childhood in the 60s & 70s, I only learned in the last year or so that the pointed ends of a crescent moon are called its “horns.” Those horns were fine and sharp when I captured this scene on 22 April 2023, with the Moon having only 4% of its sunlit surface visible here on Earth. As the Moon glided down towards the southwest this night, it slipped towards the embrace of Gulaga, the 806 metre / 2644 ft high extinct volcano, the best-known landmark in this region of New South Wales, Australia.

Gulaga has significant cultural and ancestral importance to the local indigenous Yuin people, especially the Yuin women. Wikipedia cites Gulaga as “regarded as a symbolic mother figure providing the basis for the people’s spiritual identity.” What better place for the Moon to head towards to find rest and protection for the evening?

Photographed from the cemetery at Tilba, Australia, I captured this scene with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens zoomed to 500mm at an aperture of f/8.0, using an exposure time of 1/15 second @ ISO 800.

Sometimes I struggle to find names for the photos I post. I think today's title sounds like a yoga pose, but the log pointed to the sky, so I came up with "Upward Driftwood". I didn't need the pillar of driftwood standing on the line between the grass and the sand to make me lift my eyes to the heavens, but it's an excellent visual cue for my photo.

Captured in late April on the fine sands of Baragoot Beach near Bermagui, Australia, this photo shows how colourful the night sky actually is and what we would see if our eyes worked better in low light levels. I'd had a similar experience only a half-hour earlier, photographing the Aurora Australis at a spot a few kilometres to the north. There, too, all my eyes could see was a less-dark sky than usual, but my camera had caught the crimson curtain generated high above the South Pole. The Milky Way, rising here over one of the "Three Brothers" islands, stains the sky with its plume of stars, nebulae and dust lanes.

I photographed this scene in a single shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400

Having only ever known city living in my nearly 60 years, I value times when I can get away to the country or the coast for a break. Alongside the slower pace of life, the fresher air and a chance to take in many surprising moments, the dark skies and quiet roads are some of my favourite reasons to escape. A recent south coast sojourn served up several such serene stops. This flat and straight section of road near Bodalla, Australia, has so little traffic on it at night that spending long periods standing in the middle of the road–or lying on it as I’ve done at least once before–to take photos is something you can almost take for granted.

The Milky Way’s core region had risen in the southeastern sky shortly before I arrived, and the distorted view through my camera’s fisheye lens makes our galaxy’s band of stars seem to arch across the sky and the bitumen. The Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy is almost centred in the scene, to the right of the row of poplars planted next to the road. I was fortunate to have cloudless heavens for five of the eight nights I was in the area, and on every one of those nights, the sky’s predominant colour was the subtle green generated by atmospheric airglow. I couldn’t see the electrical wires hanging overhead, showing as black scores on that green sky in my photo. As is often the case, though, perfection is elusive, and the wires’ presence in the shot isn’t too distracting.

Shot as a single frame, this night sky photo was taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Samyang 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens @ f/5.6, using an exposure time of 45 seconds @ ISO 12800.

While folk in the top half of our planet enjoy spring, we’re well on our way to winter down here, down under. Most of Australia’s trees don’t shed their leaves, but plenty of imported species get naked each autumn. This foliage-free tree was happy to be a foreground feature for this photo I took last Friday night, 12th May 2023, at Jaspers Brush, Australia.

I composed this shot with the Milky Way’s core behind the tree, rather than in the open, to try something I don’t usually do. There’s still no missing the yellowish hue of the heart of our home galaxy, 27000 light-years distant, glowing in the night sky. At this location, the Milky Way rises over Cullunghutti, aka Coolangatta Mountain, a recognised and declared place of great significance to the region’s First Nations people.

As with most of my photos, I shot this scene using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera. I used a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, and the exposure time was 10 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Standing abandoned, rusting and neglected in the long grass, this earthmoving vehicle looked like it would appreciate some attention, such as posing for one of my nightscape photos. I don’t know why this and the half-dozen or so other metal monsters were left to the elements at the Jaspers Brush Airfield, Australia, but I did my best to restore some of their collective dignity.

With the Milky Way climbing the southeastern sky over Coolangatta Mountain, I made my best effort to provide foreground lighting and backlighting of the cabin to give a sense of an implement standing by for some destruction or construction, as the case may be. A light ground fog in the background added some atmosphere while another abandoned device lurked on the right of the shot, waiting for its turn to shine, or rather, to be shone on.

I blended two near-identical single-frame shots to create this image, with one shot exposed for the tractor and the other trying to capture the Milky Way’s delightful details. Each photo was captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera & a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

How many songs, stories, poems or ponderings have been written about the Moon? There would be too many to count, but enough that I don’t feel bad for not being able to come up with a new reflection now. Instead, here are some facts about our planet’s celestial neighbour that were true when I captured this photo last 24th May 2023. •

Proportion of the Moon lit by the Sun 19%
(as viewed from Earth)

• Distance from the Earth
403,182.305 km (250,525.87 miles)

• Diameter at lunar equator
1,738 km(1079.94 mi)

• Mass
7.34767309 × 10^22 kg (1.61988463 x 10^23 lb)

I hope you’ve noticed that the Moon is visible in the daytime and not only at night. That was the case when I snapped this image using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, attached to my SkyWatcher 8” Dobsonian telescope, using an exposure time of 1/250 second @ ISO 100.

We don’t encounter below-zero temperatures where I live in Sydney, Australia’s most populous city. However, when I visited the area around Captains Flat near Canberra (Australia’s capital city) a few weeks back, my car’s thermometer proudly displayed “-3ºC” alongside an icon of a snowflake. Brrr! Sure, it was cold, but crisp, cloudless nights this time of year provide clear and stable air for capturing lots of stars in your nightscape photos.

The structure framed by trees and the rising Milky Way in this photo is the St Thomas’ Anglican Church, a 149-year-old sanctuary that now only sees services held monthly. It’s a grand building I wouldn’t have known about had I not scouted the area for shooting locations a month prior. Even then, though, I thought the trees were too close to the building to be able to get an effective composition that included the Milky Way, but I was glad to prove myself wrong. The whole scene looks like it was meant to be!

I captured this single-frame image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400. For foreground lighting, I used two Lume Cube LED lamps.

The long-abandoned railway line to the Southern Tablelands town of Captains Flat, Australia, has the distinction of being one of the shortest-lived branch lines in its resident state of New South Wales. The 34 km (21.1 mi) long track was opened in 1940 to provide passenger and freight services to support the town's copper mining operations but closed after only 28 years in August 1968. The Captains Flat railway had one last gasp in August of 1969 when it was used for location shooting of the feature film, Ned Kelly, starring Mick Jagger!

A few weekends back, with my 20-odd kg camera pack on my back, I stumbled down the hill from the road bridge that runs parallel to this rail viaduct, looking for a relatively flat spot to put my tripod and camera gear. "Mate, look out for wombat holes. They're everywhere here," was the warning a passing farmer had given me a few minutes earlier. Once I'd set up and started taking photos, I was startled to hear a grunting sound nearby. I looked up and saw the source of the noise. The biggest wombat I've ever seen had come out of its hole to find out who'd come into its domain on this cold night. After a short staring competition, the wombat returned to his digging, and I kept capturing shots like this of the Milky Way's core rising in the southeast.

This single-frame image was shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400. I lit the bridge and foreground with two Lume Cube LED lamps.

I spent a few hours driving between locations the night I captured this scene, trying to avoid the ground fog that seemed to be chasing me around the Eurobodalla region of Australia’s southeast coast. Some mist had stubbornly settled at the spot where I shot this scene, but it was only thin and added a lovely soft feel to the receding rural road in the lower left of my photo.

The autumn-affected tree that dominates the foreground isn’t native to Australia. Still, its flamboyant foliage added a lovely touch of red to the overall green hues visible in the tree, the nearby paddocks and the airglow-illuminated sky. Looking at the image now, I find my gaze shifting between the colourful flora and the magnificence of the Milky Way’s core rising over the hill in the distance. If you can zoom in on the scene, you’ll see a brick chimney standing alone, the only remains of a farmhouse that was obliterated in the fires that overran our eastern coastline in early 2020.

This photo is a stitched panorama created from seven overlapping frames I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Although first released in 1954, Frank Sinatra's 1964 version of the song "Fly Me to the Moon" is the best-known rendition of the famous composition (Note: there were well over 100 versions recorded before Sinatra's). NASA astronauts played the track from a cassette tape recording during the Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 space missions due to how closely linked to the Moon missions the song was in its day.

Growing up during the "space race" of the 1960s and early 70s, I expected that being able to fly to the Moon would be an everyday opportunity by the time I was an adult. As it turned out, I was more than a little off-target, and since I'll reach the 60 yr-old mark in mid-2024, I've put a Moon flight onto my life's "maybe one-day" list.

Captured in June of 2022 (clouds obscured the June full Moon of 2023), I shot this photo with my Canon EOS 7D camera and Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens. The lens was zoomed to 500 mm at an aperture of f/7.1, while the camera's shutter speed was 1/320 second @ ISO 1600.

“Quietness is the beginning of virtue. To be silent is to be beautiful. Stars do not make a noise.” James Stephens, Irish poet, 1880–1950. It was easy not to make a noise as I stood here at the Cuttagee bridge on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, looking at the stars in April this year.

Nature was providing a wonderful soundscape already and did not need any effort on my part. To my left was the repeating thud as waves flopped onto the beach at the edge of the Tasman Sea while soothing bubbling and gurgling calls issued from the hasteless flow of Cuttagee Creek as it passed under the old bridge to join that same watery expanse.

Augmenting the aural beauty was the scene in the sky, with starry points of light, a star cluster or two, and the powder-puff wisps of the Magellanic Clouds wordlessly telling of their wonders to all who would hear.

I created this image by shooting two overlapping photos and stitching them together. Both frames were shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Only two days after the beginning of another lunar cycle, the Moon’s slender but bright arc stood out against the twilight tones in the sky over Gulaga, the sacred mountain that broods over the landscape near Bermagui, Australia. A granite cross, marking the memory of a long-passed local, offered itself as another sacred feature for this photograph captured in late April of 2023.

Although adjacent to each other in my field of view, these three elements stood apart from each other by great distances. While the cross was only a couple of metres from my camera, and Guluga another 8 km behind that, the Moon was alone in the coldness of space, orbiting our planet at a distance of around 385,000 km (240,000 mi). Although so far apart, I think these three “m” objects belonged together.

To capture this photo, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera attached to a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 266 mm @ f/16, using an exposure time of 1/5 seconds @ ISO 200.

Its flow paused by the turning of the tide, the Moruya River’s mirror-like surface offered twice as much Milky Way for me to photograph than I expected when I shot this photo in April 2023. The fine, bright points we see as stars have their reflections stretched and fattened by the slight movement of even the most still body of water and were captured here by my camera as colourful streaks.

Across the river from my photo spot, the red glow of an aircraft obstruction light in the township of Moruya Heads carried on its task of warning pilots of the terrain near the nearby airport.

I captured this single-frame photo with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Trains still pass through Mount Murray Station, but the station has been closed since passenger services ceased on the Unanderra to Moss Vale line in New South Wales, Australia, in the 1980s. Mount Murray was opened in 1932, and its elevation is around 780 metres (2560 ft) above sea level atop the Illawarra Escarpment. As I can attest from my recent nocturnal visit, the winter nights can get cold and windy up there! Considering the station is only 25 km from the port city of Wollongong, and 75 km from the outskirts of Sydney, Australia's largest city, I'm surprised at how well the Milky Way shows up against the background sky. I shot seven overlapping images with a wide-angle lens to create this photo, moving the camera from horizontal to vertical in the process, resulting in the band of the Milky Way presenting an unusual alignment with the horizon. For each of those frames, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera coupled with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

On the third Sunday of every month, this tiny church building comes alive with people greeting one another, singing together in worship and, no doubt, listening to their minister's sermon. For the remaining days of the year, the weatherboard-construction sanctuary sits idle, a landmark for passing motorists to glimpse as they make their way along the Cooma Road.

While visiting the Southern Tablelands region in April this year, I noticed this church and returned to shoot nightscape photos last Friday, 16th June 2023. The cloudless and light-pollution-free skies in the area let the starlight shine brightly, and two Lume Cube LED lamps did a fine job illuminating the one-hundred-and-ten-year-old building for my photo. I set the lens' focus to be on the church, giving a slightly out-of-focus look to the sky.

Captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/13, I exposed this photo for 13 seconds at an ISO setting of 3200.

I found it satisfying to capture this image of the Milky Way's stretch of stars, dust and nebulae, rising in the southeast at close to ninety degrees to the foreground. Most of my photos from the first half of any year typically have the Milky Way at the same angle as here but with a horizon line parallel to the scene's bottom edge.

The outline of this hill on the northern shoreline of the Murrumbidgee River near Cavan, NSW, Australia, caught my eye with its steep gradient to the horizontal, and the silhouetted limbs of a tree on its slope give another point of interest. The dark dust lanes in the Milky Way's wispy structure could almost be mirroring the spindly twists of the dead tree's bare branches as they point to the sky.

I shot this single-frame photo using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0 using an exposure time of 10.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The location known as Cathedral Rocks at Kiama Downs is famous for its two massive structures that look like European cathedrals. Near these landmarks, many of the channels and rock pools along the shoreline offer plenty of interesting compositions for daytime and nocturnal photographers. I took advantage of one of these earlier in June of 2023.

Much older than the ancient rock formations at ground level, the Milky Way’s galactic core was halfway up the sky when I was clambering over the rocks and trying to keep my feet dry this Friday night. Still, the composition that I ended up with shows the immensity and majesty of this most ancient of natural wonders dominating the night and left me feeling a sense of awe at the beauty of creation.

Today’s photo was created using a photographic process known as “stacking”, using multiple shots photographed within a short time and then combined in software to reduce the amount of visible digital noise. I shot four single-frame images using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/4.0, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Seemingly suspended in the night sky over the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, the puff-like Magellanic Clouds dominate this scene I photographed in mid-June of 2023. These unimaginatively named galaxies—the “Small” and “Large” Magellanic Clouds—never set below the horizon in many areas of Australia and were at their lowest point in the sky when I snapped them.

A lucky strike was the meteor that flashed for less than a second to provide the bright streak to the left of the Large cloud. The ambient temperature at ground level (about 800 metres / 2624 feet above sea level) was below zero degrees C as I stood beside my tripod. Several degrees colder high above my position, the moist night air shows a thin but noticeable fog in my photo that caused the background sky to look whiter here than I could see with my eyes.

This photo was created by shooting ten frames of the same part of the sky and stacking them in the Macintosh app “Starry Landscape Stacker” to reduce digital noise and enhance the final image. I captured each of those ten shots using a Canon EOS 6D camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.6, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

My wife and I spied the windmill in today’s photo in mid-April while driving south from our holiday spot at Tuross Head, NSW, to Tathra, another of the beautiful coastal towns in this part of Australia. After dark, I headed back to the spot a few days later, knowing that the windmill would be in the perfect position to feature it against the Milky Way rising in the distance.

With dinner eaten, my camera and LED lamp batteries charged and several layers of clothes to keep me warm, I completed the 100 km (62 mi) drive. I arrived to discover that the windmill and everything for about 500 metres around it was covered in fog. There was next to no breeze, so the mist sat heavy in the little gully and did a fine but unwanted job of reflecting my LED lamps’ light at me and making the Milky Way hard to see.

You can make out the Milky Way’s core region peeking above the horizon to the left of the windmill’s tower, showing an orange glow due to atmospheric refraction, in the same way that the sun and moon look extra-golden as they rise.

This photo is a single-frame image, shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I didn't plan to wake up at 3:45 this morning, unable to get back to sleep before my working day started, but some ongoing abdominal pain took charge, and that's what time my day started. Our winter in Sydney, Australia, has been unusually dry this year, and our skies have been clear for weeks now. Since I was forced to be awake, I made the most of things and captured some shots of Jupiter, the Moon and the Pleiades star cluster looking delightful in the pre-dawn sky.

I took this photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 2.0 seconds @ ISO 200.

Airborne moisture and a hazy horizon made it difficult to get a sharp and clear image of the Milky Way rising when I visited Cuttagee Beach, Australia, in late April this year.

Despite those challenges, I caught some of the majesty of our home galaxy’s core region as it climbed the sky. A prominent feature of this region of the sky is the Lagoon Nebula, aka M8, an interstellar cloud that shows in my photo as a distinctly pink blob about one-third of the way up from the bottom of the shot. At the bottom right, you can see a reflection of the yellowed glow of the Milky Way’s core area.

Due to how much the hazy conditions dimmed the sky, I pushed my camera’s sensitivity setting, the ISO, up beyond what I normally use for nightscape photos. I shot nine images in succession using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f2.2, with an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 12800. The nine single shots were then edited in Adobe Lightroom and stacked using Starry Landscape Stacker.

Later this year, I'll mark ten years of shooting nightscape photos with digital cameras. I started taking pictures of the night sky with my mum's black-and-white film camera in 1978 and continued for a couple of years until study demands at school and other interests took over. In 2013, after devouring many online tutorials, I began shooting night sky photos with my Canon EOS 7D digital SLR.

Now, ten years down the track and with over 110,000 images under my belt, it's humbling to know that I'm still learning and still capable of making basic errors. The panoramic photo I'm posting today is a heartbreaking example of making a "rookie error" long after I should be doing such things. Created from forty-one single-frame images, this photo captures the Milky Way arched over the Princes Highway near Bodalla, Australia, in early July 2023.

Despite the remoteness of the location, the highway was quite busy on the night, and I had to re-take several frames due to car or truck headlights shining straight into the lens and ruining the shot. When I got home and loaded the images onto my Mac, I saw that the lens hadn't been focused on the stars! That is a definite rookie error. I'd checked and rechecked my focus several times before taking the shots for the panorama, but I must have bumped my lens sometime after the first row of twelve because all photos from that point on have blobs instead of pinpoint stars. "Live and learn" is the expression, I think.

I captured each of the 41 shots used in this panorama with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.5, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

These sinewy and spindly poplars, with their leaves now dead and shedding, caught my eye while I was looking for a shooting location near Bodalla, Australia, in April of 2023. The long and thin branches seemed to intersect the Milky Way’s fine dust lanes, and I imagined that those terrestrial and celestial elements were intertwined in some bonding ritual.

Stands of poplars are a common sight in along roads in the Australian countryside, despite the trees not being native to our land. The trees were imported from Europe by earlier settlers, but the sky they rise in front of is distinctly that of a Southern Hemisphere location. Across the fields behind the poplars are lights indicating the homes of local farmers, probably wondering who the strange man with the LED lamps was off in the darkness. I hope they took the time to look up and see the magic overhead!

I captured this single-frame photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200.

The coastal town of Narooma, in my state of New South Wales, Australia, is built on the shores of the Wagonga Inlet, a 6.9 square-kilometre lake that empties into the Tasman Sea. In the northwest reach of the inlet is the Wagonga Wharf, where I shot this photo of the Milky Way riding high over the still waters in early July 2023. The wharf was first used as an unloading point for sailing vessels and small steamers in the 1860s. The current structure was built in 1996.

It was too late at night for me to capture the Milky Way’s core rising over the hills, so I shot the frames to create this tall and narrow image of the Milky Way higher up in the sky over the gorgeous spot. I think I can still hear the silence of the locale when I look at my photo!

To create this vertical panorama, I shot seven overlapping frames with the camera focused on the sky, then one extra image with the wharf in focus. I blended the images in Photoshop and a stitching program to generate what you see here. For each of the eight photos that comprise the final scene, I used a Canon EOS 6D camera (Mark 1) and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Formed by the cooling of lava flowing to the sea millions of years ago and shaped by the erosive actions of the sea since then, the basalt columns at Cathedral Rocks near Kiama, Australia, have a majestic and inspiring presence. The outcrop in my photo today is the smaller of the two “cathedrals” at this location, yet it’s as fascinating and photogenic as its larger sibling.

The Milky Way was making its way from the horizon towards the zenith, looking down on these ancient rocks as I shot multiple images to create this vertical panorama. Capturing stars in photos requires a longer shutter speed than used in daylight photos, and this has the added attraction of rendering the waves as smooth and blurred patches of white to contrast with the harshness of the rocks. The lights of two ships heading north to Port Kembla made bright dents on the otherwise straight horizon.

I shot and then stitched five overlapping frames to create this final image. Each photo was captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Even if such things were within my control, I couldn’t have done a better job of matching the sky colour to that of the grassy hills at Bodalla, Australia, when I captured this image in April of 2023. Atmospheric airglow can show itself in various colours, and green is the one I’ve seen the most in my night sky photos. Despite how black or charcoal grey the sky might look to our human eyes, there’s plenty of colour to capture in photos. Shining through that “background” hue (the airglow is actually happening in front of the stars and not behind them), the light of the billions of members of our Milky Way galaxy dot the dome of night. Dark dust and gas strewn between the stars and us on Earth make mottled smudges and smears on the heavenly canvas.

I shot this scene with a 14 mm wide-angle lens on my camera, making the corners of the photo look stretched and distorted. Trying to compensate for this distortion, I leaned towards the tree while attempting to stand still for the twenty-five seconds that the shutter was open. Looking at the result here, I see that I leaned too far!

The 14 mm lens I mentioned above was attached to my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and set to f/3.5. I chose an exposure time of 25 seconds, set the camera’s ISO to 6400, and used two Lume Cube LED lamps to light the foreground.

It’s a pleasant surprise when someone takes an interest in what you’re up to, standing next to a tripod on the edge of a farm next to a dirt road at the back of beyond on a mid-winter night. The farmer who pulled up his utility when he saw someone parked on the access road to his hay shed on the evening I shot this photo was keen to know why a guy was wandering around in the dark right next to that hay shed. “Photos,” I said. “Night sky photos.”

After he saw my camera and some of the images I’d already shot, the farmer gave me his blessing and drove off into the night. I was glad for the interaction but was racing against the clock. The 83%-illuminated Moon was due to rise in about 45 minutes, so I had to get on with things. It took me quite a few test shots before I was happy with my foreground lighting (but I’m still unhappy with it) and pressed ahead to capture the remaining photos that make up this vertical panorama.

I captured nine single-frame images to make up this final photo, using my trusty old Canon EOS 6D camera and Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

About two months ago, I spent the weekend in the southern tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia. Beyond the southeastern corner of those tablelands is the Araluen Valley, named for the town that occupies the plains therein. After a 300 km (186 mi) drive from home, I got a few night sky shots up on the high plains, then followed the very winding road down to Araluen. Apart from a couple of test shots, the only photos I took on this visit were the forty that make up this panorama.

My camera caught the overall bottle-green colour of atmospheric distortion across the sky. When you look at the right-hand half of the pano, where the arch of the Milky Way peters out, you can see a lighter shade of green, indicating more intense photochemical activity in the atmosphere. The reddish-pink hues closer to the horizon are from the Aurora Australis, which was very active that night. I was down in a valley when I should have been up on the high plains or up a mountain getting aurora photos! I reckon the aurora was worth missing, considering how my panorama worked out!

I mentioned above that I captured forty single-frame photos to create the panorama you see here. For each image, I used my Canon EOS 6D camera fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Please excuse my play on the line from The Lord’s Prayer that I’ve chosen as the title for today’s photo. Taken in April 2023 near Bodalla, Australia, this image made me think of how similar things on Earth can look to some of the immense structures in our Milky Way galaxy. Certainly, there’s a massive difference in scale between the tree’s dead, angular branches and the dark, angular shapes of what astronomers call “dust lanes.” Still, looking at the twisted shapes in the sky in the top-left of my photo, they look similar to the dead branches that frame them.

Or, perhaps, I overthink things! Whatever the case, looking at our universe through something more earthly increases my sense of wonder for creation.

This photo is a single exposure, captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Cuttagee Beach is one of the dozens of beaches on the “Sapphire Coast” region of New South Wales, Australia, so named for the blue hues of the waters along that coast. Looking at this panorama that I shot in late April of 2023, the dominating colour is more green than blue, caused by what’s known as atmospheric airglow. Human eyes can’t see colour in low light, so to me, the shaded sky looked more “light black” than the distinct hues my camera caught.

Earlier in the night, the Aurora Australis had been very active, and I got photos that showed a vivid pink/red colour in the sky at a location north of this beach. The auroral activity had dropped off significantly when I was capturing the photos for this pano, but there’s a faint hint of pink on the horizon to the right of the centre, where the lights of beachfront houses are glowing. I might not have been able to see all of the colours my photo displays, but there were plenty of stars to look at, and the peace & quiet were soothing.

I shot this 44-image panorama with my Canon EOS 6D camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 13.0 seconds @ ISO 3200. The stitched panorama was a 1.38 GB file with dimensions of 21476 x 10738 pixels.

Midnight was only minutes away as I shot the eight frames I combined to create this tall, narrow image on a cold and clear night in June of 2023. Although the sky looked cloudless, my camera caught some thin cloud near the horizon that mixed green atmospheric airglow with the fading crimsons near the horizon, the last gasp of this night’s auroral activity. Those blended hues add extra interest to the sky while not distracting from the splendour of the number of stars visible in this dark sky location between Braidwood and Cooma in New South Wales, Australia.

In actuality, I shot nine photos to create this panorama, using a technique called “focus stacking” so that the grasses and fence in the foreground were as in focus as the starry sky above. I used my Canon EOS 6D camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.6 mounted on a Nodal Ninja 3 panoramic head for each of those nine photos. The exposure time was 13.0 seconds per shot, with the camera’s ISO set to 6400.

I get a lot of enjoyment out of creating images that show off the wonders of the night sky. Browsing through my posts, you’ll often see me feature the Milky Way’s galactic core or the enchanting dwarf galaxies known as the Magellanic Clouds. Now and then, I like to include the Moon in my shots, and far less often, I’ll give you a photo of the Sun that I’ve captured with my telescope.

Today, though, I’ve opted for a much simpler scene to post. This photo takes me back to being a boy and looking up at the dark sky when we were out of the city. I didn’t know any constellations or asterisms other than Orion or the Southern Cross, but looking up and encountering far more stars than I’d ever seen made me feel a sense of wonder. I hope I can imbue you with some of that wonder today.

My simple single, as I call such shots, was taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.2, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 12800.

Earlier this year, I shared a photo featuring the disused, ninety-one-year-old Mount Murray Railway Station under the rising Milky Way. That image was well received here and in a few railway groups on Facebook. While ferreting through my “WIP” folder (Work In Progress) in Adobe Lightroom this week, I remembered I’d shot another vertical panorama of the lovely old station when I visited the location early in June.

In today’s photo, we’re looking down the tracks towards the industrial city of Wollongong and its urban sprawl and busy shipping port, Port Kembla. The lights from my state’s third-largest city have rendered the sky above them white through the trees in the distance. Despite that glare, I still caught plenty of detail in the core region of the Milky Way.

I created this image by shooting seven overlapping frames, each captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The two large basalt formations that reach skyward at Jones Beach, north of Kiama, Australia, are collectively called "Cathedral Rocks." I posted a photo of the smaller structure in July of this year, and I captured today's image of the larger "cathedral" under the rising Milky Way the same June night I shot the previously posted scene.

Light from the LED lamps I'd placed near the edge of the rock shelf that I stood on combined with the photons spilling from streetlights and homes in the suburb of Kiama Downs to illuminate the rocks, the distant headland and the water surrounding the rocky island.

The five single-frame photos I shot and then stacked to create this image were all captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Today's photo is the second I've posted from my visit to the abandoned Captains Flat railway line in the Monaro region of New South Wales, Australia. I'd scouted the location during the daytime a few months before making the long drive from my home on a Friday night in June 2023. Constructed in 1939, it's a credit to the architects and builders that the bridge is still standing, with the piers and girders in good condition. The same can't be said for the structure's rotting sleepers and rusting rails.

Although the sky looked free of clouds to my eyes, the scene my camera captured showed a thin moisture layer that discoloured the night's atmospheric airglow and changed the tones usually seen in the Milky Way's core region. I plan to return to the Molonglo River site sometime in the first half of 2024 to try to capture the same scene without the murkiness you see here.

Unlike my previous post from this site, today's photo is a stack of seven single-frame images, each captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.6, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200.

The Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy travelling through space with our Milky Way, looked like a blissful bloom as it hung over St Mark's Anglican Church at Currawong in New South Wales, Australia, in August of 2022. Estimated to be made up of over 20 billion stars and with a radius of around 32,000 light-years, this relatively small galaxy is roughly 160,000 light-years from Earth and is visible with the naked eye to Southern Hemisphere observers. Having seen the Large cloud and its companion, the Small Magellanic Cloud, I understand where the name came from.

The church at Currawong was built between 1918 and 1919, so it's young as far as "old" churches go. The bluestone granite blocks were quarried locally and formed into the walls of the building by volunteer labour on donated land.

I created this image by shooting twenty consecutive photos of the scene (10x lights, 10x darks), which I processed in Adobe Lightroom and then stacked using Starry Landscape Stacker. Each of the ten light frames was captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200. The ten dark frames were shot with the same settings while the lens cap was in place.

The 5%-illuminated Moon was slowly gliding down to the western horizon tonight, seemingly balancing on the boom of a construction crane a few hundred metres from my home. The Moon wasn’t as close as the crane, obviously, moving through space in its orbit around the Earth, nearly 399,000 km (248,000 mi) away. Lights from the intersection near the construction site provided plenty of glow to make the crane’s formwork visible.

While I enjoy the long car trips I take to get to dark skies for my Milky Way images, it was nice only to have to walk from my desk to our balcony to photograph this scene.

I shot this single-frame photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera attached to a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 500 mm @ f/7.1, using an exposure time of 0.6 seconds @ ISO 1600.

The most massive of the planets in our solar system, Jupiter, is one of the “gas giant” planets. As far as we know, Jupiter is almost wholly comprised of gases, and all that gas makes it an excellent reflector of the Sun’s light. After the Moon and Venus, Jupiter is the brightest object regularly visible in Earth’s night sky.

Jupiter had not long risen when I captured today’s photo of it ascending the sky off Gerroa, Australia, with its gorgeous glow reflected by the headland’s tidal rock pools. I lit the foreground with my LumeCube LED lamps, giving the rocks and gravelly beach a yellowed look, adding to the other-worldly feel of the entire scene.

I captured this single-frame image using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Today’s post is from a visit to Carrington Falls, in the Southern Highlands region of my state of New South Wales, Australia, early in September.

The Milky Way was moving towards being parallel with the southwestern horizon when I captured this three-frame vertical panoramic image at the top of the falls. Not far past the rocks and flowing pool in the photo’s foreground, the waters of the Kangaroo River reach the edge of the escarpment and plunge 160 metres (520 ft) to the valley floor below. On the horizon, you can see the distant glow of the town of Marulan, nearly 60 km (37 mi) away.

I used my Canon EOS 6 Mk II camera to capture the three images that make up the final panorama, coupled with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 3200.

My nightscape photography expeditions have been less frequent than I’d hoped for this year. With the Milky Way’s core almost gone until early 2024, this image I captured in mid-September might be my last shot of this part of the sky for 2023.

The starry band of the Milky Way was hanging over the top of the landform known as Black Head at Gerroa, Australia when I captured this 30-frame stacked image. I lit the cliff face with two Lume Cube LED lamps, and light spilling from the town of Nowra—23 km (14.3 mi) distant—was responsible for the backlighting of Coolangatta Mountain, at the bottom left of the scene and the waters of Berry’s Bay in between.

In mid-September this year, I ventured south to Gerroa, a lovely coastal location here in Australia, for what looks to have been my final Milky Way core photo session for 2023. The rock platform surrounding the headland at Gerroa has fascinating features that draw amateur and professional geologists and fossil hunters by day and keen nightscape photographers in the darker hours. You can see some of the tessellated features in the shallow rock pools that the rising tide filled during my time there.

At this time each year, you can photograph the Milky Way as it sinks towards the southwestern horizon, forming the arched shape I captured in this 55-frame panorama. Although the distant towns of Berry and Nowra are much smaller than the metropolitan areas of Kiama, Wollongong and Sydney to their north, they still pump out plenty of stray illumination in all directions, as you can see from the bright and white “light domes” along the distant horizon. The location is a 110 km (68 mi) drive from my home in Sydney but still far enough from civilisation to avoid such light pollution.

I shot the frames that make up the panorama using my Canon EOS 6D Mk I camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

The shallow, dark waters pooled at the top of Carrington Falls, Australia, reflected the light emanating from the Eta Carinae region of the Milky Way, stretching upwards, as I photographed this scene in early September of 2023. Despite being a very popular hiking and picnic location, I had the hooting of owls, the rippling of the pools and the distant crashing of the waterfall to myself this Saturday night.

Since I didn’t have my panoramic tripod head with me, I resorted to first principles, using my camera and a standard tripod, plus good old dead reckoning to ensure I had good overlap between the nine frames that make up this vertical panorama. In the end, I misaligned things and came close to missing out on the lovely circle of stars near the bright-orange star Antares at the right-hand edge of the frame, but I’m pleased with the final result.

This abandoned building is tagged on Google Maps as “Cullinga Hall/School?” So far, I’ve not found any further details of the building’s history, but it’s a very photogenic structure that posed nicely for me when I visited last Monday night, 13th November. Located in the Riverina District of New South Wales, Australia, the old hall isn’t far from the towns of Wallendbeen and Cootamundra, in an area that farms wheat, canola, cereal crops, sheep, wool, fat lambs and cattle.

The Large Magellanic Cloud was prominent in the sky, seen here at the top-right corner of my photo. The second-brightest star visible in our planet’s night skies, Canopus, was sending forth its photons and appears here down the centreline of the shot. Atmospheric airglow tinted the sky a lovely green hue, which looks like a colourful canvas sprinkled with stars, even though the stars are much further away in space.

I captured this shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400, and I lit the foreground with two Lume Cube LED lamps.

The Murrumbidgee River flows for around 1485 km (923 mi) and is the second-longest river in Australia. I photographed the starry southern sky over and reflected in the river from the northern approach of the Taemas Bridge, about 40 km (25 mi) northwest of Australia’s capital, Canberra, on a night in mid-June of 2023.

Looking across the river in my photo, you can see the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds–satellite galaxies of our Milky Way–hanging listlessly over the rolling hills, with the larger of the two “clouds” reflected in the Murrumbidgee below. Also reflected in the water is Canopus, the second-brightest star visible in the Earth’s night skies, and a scattering of other stars from this region of the heavenly sphere. I hope to return to the bridge in 2024 and try to capture a “Milky Way arch” panorama.