The ocean rock platforms at Gerroa, Australia, are one of my favourite destinations to visit for shooting nightscape photos. I usually head to the coastal town during the front end of Milky Way Core season (January through May). In those months I can point my camera to the east and capture the Milky Way’s central band and galactic core rising over the Tasman Sea, with the lights of a distant ship or fishing boat being the only possible source of light pollution.

Last night (Tuesday 10th November 2020) was my first nightscape photo outing in a month, but being a weeknight, it meant that I couldn’t stay out too late, restricting how far I could travel. It would have been best to visit a site with little or no light pollution in the western sky, but Gerroa was my default choice for its relative proximity to home. Photographing the Milky Way at this time of year requires shooting towards the west, and the rural town of Nowra was spilling light in all directions. You can see its wasteful glow backlighting the landscape across most of the left half of my shot.

The Milky Way doesn’t stand out the way I’d hoped due to all of that man-made glow. However, you can see some of its colour and wispy details in a line laying parallel to the horizon and reflected in the shallow saltwater pool in the foreground. I also captured the lovely beacons from the planets Jupiter and Saturn as they hung high in the sky, towards the centre of the scene.

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

From what I remember of the night that I captured the scene, I was labouring to find a composition that showed the majesty of the dead tree and also included the Milky Way’s galactic core. While I was squinting at my camera’s Liveview display to see if this framing would work, the high-beam headlamps of a vehicle on the nearby dirt road blared across the spot and lit up the dead tree, as well as most of the living ones that surrounded it. Thankfully, I clicked the shutter button and let the camera record the scene as you see it here.

When I look at the photo, the negative space in the image isolates the tree and draws me eyes to its well-lit form, and then up to the celestial canopy of the Milky Way’s stars, nebulae and dust lanes. The top of the tree seems to reach up to touch the sky, tying heaven and earth together. The next time I visit this location–near Bodalla, Australia–I will make sure to see if the lifeless limbs are still stretching skyward.

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

There are lots of factors that need to be in sync for me to make the final decision to go out on a nightscape photography shoot. Last Friday night (Sept 11) those ducks were all in a row for me, as the saying goes. The weather forecast included cloudless skies; the Moon wasn’t due to rise until around 2:00 am on Saturday; the Milky Way would be in the western sky for hours on end, and I could sleep in once home and the daylight hours came around.

Despite all of that fortune, there were several times on my outbound trip that I found myself wanting to turn my car around and go back home. The gnawing self-doubt that assails me during most of my waking hours was once again urging me to give up, to head for home and to stop kidding myself that any of my photographs are worth looking at, let alone posting online.

After working on today’s photo, though, I’m glad that I pushed through. Being able to capture and share the beauty that I saw in the sky–and the wonders that only the camera can record–reminds me that perseverance often pays off. The Milky Way was very low in the southwestern sky over this man-made pond in the Jerrawangala National Park when I shot the two frames that I used to create the final stitched composite image. You can see the stretched reflection of the red supergiant star Antares on the muddy pond’s surface, with the star itself hovering over the eucalyptus trees in the distance.

I captured the two individual photos that make up this final image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Too much moonlight and too many clouds have kept me from shooting any new nightscape photos recently. In times like this, the frustrated photographer is motivated to trawl through their unposted images to see what treasures might be hiding on one’s hard disk drive. I found this gem in a folder of photos shot on my trip to Tuross Head, on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, in September of 2018.

After capturing a total of zero frames on the Friday night of this weekend of photography, I was blessed beyond all belief with what Saturday delivered. The sky was cloudless, the air was still, and the shallow water at the lake’s edge was hosting a bloom of blue bioluminescent critters. You can see the central band and galactic core of the Milky Way looking glorious over the southwestern horizon, with the planet Mars reflecting the Sun’s light from its orange-coloured surface. The distant mountains are visible courtesy of the atmospheric airglow that offered me the gorgeous green background colour that dominates my photo.

This image was created by shooting four overlapping photos and stitching them into the final scene using software on my Mac. I captured the four frames using my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

October is nearly upon us and with it the dwindling number of hours that the Milky Way’s core region is visible in the western sky. Our Southern Hemisphere daylight hours are increasing, too, making it more of a challenge to get out, get shooting and get some more Milky Way magic for the year.

Back on September 11, I was out in my car, hundreds of kilometres from my home in Miranda, Australia, searching for a new location to capture Milky Way images before the season vanishes completely. Realising that I was spending too much time driving and not enough shooting, I eventually returned to this small storage pond that I had visited several times in the past three years. The absence of any breeze left the pond’s surface still, rendering it a magical mirror to double the splendour of the Milky Way’s shiny spectacle.

This photo is a stitched image that I created by shooting seven overlapping frames that I then composited in software. I shot each of those seven frames with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The array of farming and earthmoving equipment sprinkled across this field near Nowra, Australia, makes the scene look like a mechanical graveyard. Some of the vehicles seemed to be in working order, but as I explored the area, I saw that most of the items were broken, rusting, missing parts and appearing to be very much abandoned.

Useable or not, all of these inanimate inhabitants were treated to the grand spectacle of the night sky’s wonders on this night in June of 2020. Jupiter and Saturn made their way up and across the Australian sky, trailing the grand swathe of the Milky Way as they displayed their beauty for my camera to capture. You’ll have to squint and zoom to see Saturn since it had only cleared the horizon–to the left of the distant shape of Coolangatta Mountain–a minute or so before I snapped this shot.

I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera for this shot, as well as the Rokinon 24 mm lens that’s served me well for several years. My camera’s shutter speed was set to 15.0 seconds, and I chose an ISO setting of 6400 with the lens’ aperture at f/2.4.

The photo on the right of this composite image is the shot I posted yesterday (02 Sept 2020), taken next the rural airstrip at Jaspers Brush near Nowra, Australia. Captured at the same location, the other half of the image shows how the scene looked under the Moon’s light, a little over two weeks earlier. On my second visit, I forgot to check to see which lens I’d shot with previously, so there’s a difference between the field of view of the two photos.

My efforts at lighting the foreground features of the right-hand image via LED banks were OK, but their results don’t compare to the consistency of brightness and the vivid colours that the moonlight gave me on my first visit.

dHere are the settings that I used when shooting each photo:

- Left: Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4x, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

- Right: Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I’ve not yet visited this location near Nowra, NSW, Australia, during daylight hours. My two car trips here took place after the sun had set, in May and June of this year. Although the area was in darkness, my LED headlamp was bright enough to let me see that the oily look of the water that I’ve captured in this photo is how the irrigation channel looks even in sunlight. As the title of my shot describes it, the area is best seen at night!

Peeking from under the trees near the centreline of the frame–and reflected from the channel’s surface immediately below–is the planet Jupiter, rising into the hazy night over the dairy farming region. Jupiter’s ascension of the sky followed a few hours behind that of the central band of our Milky Way galaxy, glowing in its glory across the top left-hand corner of my photo.

Less than thirty minutes after I captured this scene I had to pack my gear and leave due to clouds that came in from the southwest and covered the sky for the remainder of the night, according to the weather records.

The photo is a single-frame image that I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

From time-to-time, I post photos that have had little editing done to them, or even none at all, so that you can see how close to “final” I try to shoot my original images. Today’s post almost qualifies for the category of “none at all”. The only adjustments I made to this image were 1) I took two single-frame, overlapping photos and blended them into one composite or “stitched” shot, and 2) cropped that final image to trim off some of the warped edges. I didn’t sharpen, lighten, darken, de-noise or colour-adjust either the original or final images.

For sure, there are more photos than not which I edit before posting, for a variety of reasons. It’s very satisfying, though, to shoot in a dark area, with a good-quality lens, and with some foreground lighting (too bright in this case, imho), and to then see that for the most part, you got things right “in-camera”.

I captured this scene of the Milky Way setting over the hill at the ocean rock platform at Gerroa, Australia, using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, utilizing an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

There was an abundance of driftwood covering the sands of Seven Mile Beach (New South Wales, Australia) when I visited last Sunday night, tossed ashore by the intense low-pressure weather system that had given the coast a beating recently. Industrious hands had fashioned this structure out of the longer pieces to they'd found scattered around, giving me an unusual feature to use in the foreground of my photo.

I had waited for the Moon to set before trying to shoot some Milky Way images to add to my catalogue, but there was still enough lingering light from the recently-departed orb to brighten the sky near the horizon. After testing a few different alignments of the timber temple and the strip of the Milky Way high in the western sky, I chose this one that has the main lines of the earthly and heavenly structures in parallel.

The camera I used to capture this photo was my Canon EOS 6D Mk II, fitted with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8 using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

My favourite old tree on the access road to Tuross Head, Australia, seems to be leaning in for a closer look at the Milky Way's galactic core as it rises in the eastern sky in this photo that I shot in July this year. Maybe the tree's not so much trying to look closer, but to listen harder to the wisdom streaming from the stars, "day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge" (Psalm 19:2).

My photo also captured the two planets that have dominated the night sky for most of this year, Jupiter and Saturn, which are shining like Christmas baubles on the upper-left branch of the tree. The silhouette of my tiny chariot, the Suzuki Swift, is on the horizon near the left, blending into the fence line. I'm looking forward to my car taking me out under the stars again, serenaded by the sounds of frogs chatting about what the night might hold.

This photo is a single-frame image 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 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

No waves lapped the shore of Tuross Lake as I sat on the sand a little after 12:30 am on this Monday in late July. The distant clumps of cloud barely moved position the whole time I was there. Apart from my intermittent motions when pressing my camera’s shutter button, repositioning the tripod or changing lenses, the only movement noticeable was that of the lake’s water moving towards the ocean as the tide ebbed.

I’d loved to have captured this scene with no clouds present, but the stars, planets and details of the Milky Way’s central band still dominate the photo. The light spilling from a nearby streetlamp was enough to illuminate the sandy shore and the copse of trees behind it, but the beach was still dark enough for me to stumble a couple of times while walking back to my car.

Jupiter and Saturn were trailing the Milky Way down towards the southwestern horizon while the red and yellow navigation lights on the lake stood sentry for any boaties who might be out for a late-night angle.

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

A lot of twisting, turning, squinting and squatting went into lining up my camera so I could capture the planets Jupiter and Saturn framed by the superstructure of this bridge. I’m sure I won’t win any accolades for composition or the like for the photo, but I’ve had a long day at work so didn’t have much time to choose and edit a shot to post tonight. I picked this one because it required next to no work to get it ready to post. If nothing else, the photo shows how insanely amazing it can be to photograph the heavens at a truly dark site, enabling you to capture colours and details that your eyes can’t render.

I find something special in contrasting the natural wonders of the night sky with a banal, lifeless piece of human engineering such as a bridge.

The location for this photo was under the Princes Highway bridge over the Tuross River near Bodalla, Australia. To shoot the image I used 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 don’t know the name or final destination of the driver of the car that provided the foreground lighting for this shot, but if we ever meet, I’ll make sure express my thanks for their efforts. I heard the vehicle coming in the distance and tried to get some glow from the headlights on the tops of the poplars, but mistimed it and got almost a full dose of its high-beam mini-suns.

There’s a subtle tone of green atmospheric airglow in the photo and the dry night, coupled with the deep darkness that this location provided, delivered an almost overdone blast from the Milky Way’s core region. Jupiter and Saturn, the two “gas-giant” planets in our Solar System, can be seen hanging out together in the centre of the frame.

Today’s photo is a single-shot image, taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

One night late in October of this year, I made one of my epic nightscape photography journeys to the Southern Tablelands region of my state of New South Wales, Australia. The first photo location for the night was at the St Bartholomew’s Anglican Church at Windellama, southeast of the rural city of Goulburn. In the past few weeks, I have posted some photos of the church itself, and the World War I memorial that is located in the churchyard. There is also a cemetery in the grounds, covering more of the plot of land than the church and war memorial combined. The oldest headstone inscription dates to 1854.

As I was setting up my tripod and camera to find a composition that would include the Milky Way and some of the gravestones, I noticed a slow-moving and bright light climbing up the sky from the northwest. A quick check of the “Sky Guide” app on my iPhone confirmed that this was the International Space Station on its way over my part of Australia. It shows in the photo as a bright, white streak of light, up and to the right of the central monument.

On the horizon to the left of the monument, you can see an intense white glow, indicating the position of Australia’s capital city of Canberra, around 75 km (46 mi) away. This bloom of light pollution reaches up and blends with the astronomical phenomenon known as the Zodiacal Light, continuing up and to the right through Jupiter and the Milky Way’s core area.

This photo is a single-frame image that I shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I don’t want to say much about this photo of the Milky Way and Jupiter ruling over the St Bartholomew’s Anglican Church at Windellama, Australia, and the war memorial that stands in the church’s grounds. Instead, I’ll give you the words that are inscribed on the face of the stonework. They remember and try to convey the love for country, and the sacrifice, of those who heeded the call. The men all died in France, about the furthest they could have been from this quiet rural area in Australia.

ERECTED
BY THE RESIDENTS OF
WINDELLAMA
TO HONOR THE MEMORY OF
THE DISTRICT BOYS
WHO MADE
THE SUPREME SACRIFICE
GREAT WORLD WAR
1914 – 1919

The stars look down in honour.

I photographed this scene with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

At rest in the Lowther Cemetery in the Blue Mountains region of New South Wales, Australia, are approximately 160 souls. The verdant tract of countryside stands out starkly against the otherwise parched paddocks that are typical of too many parts of Australia right now. Dedicated descendants of some of the departed, or perhaps the caring hands of other locals, look to be regular visitors to the site to water the grass, trim the yard and bring dignity to the dead.

I stopped to shoot Milky Way photos at the cemetery on a one-night road trip in late October of this year. The graveyard hadn’t been on my location list for the outing; I noticed the site in my peripheral vision as I zoomed past. On the return journey from the highlands town of Oberon, I took the turnoff into the short dirt road leading to the gravesites and disused church.

The gas giant planet Jupiter looms large and luminous in the sky not far above the horizon, its orb inflated by the diffusion from a thin layer of cloud towards the southwest. The core of the Milky Way and its filigrees of dust stretch from left to right, soon after to be obscured by the horizon as our planet turned steadily on its axis.

To create this photograph, I shot three individual and overlapping frames, which were then blended using a process known as “stitching”. For each one of those three images, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, with the camera’s ISO set to 6400 and the shutter left open for 15 seconds.

The shallow valley near Nowra, Australia, where I captured this photo is isolated, sparsely populated and very, very quiet when there’s no wind blowing. On the night that I visited, in late October of 2019, the lack of wind rendered the area still and silent. The clear air gave me fantastic conditions to photograph the Milky Way and Jupiter as they began to merge with the southwestern horizon.

There is a farmhouse out-of-frame on the right, on the far side of the valley from where I set up my camera. The people who live in that house have at least two dogs, and those dogs have EXCELLENT hearing, I discovered. Any time I made a noise, like when I scraped my tripod’s leg along the road accidentally, the dogs would bark. They would bark, and keep barking, and then bark some more.

After around five minutes of the dogs continually barking, I heard the owner’s voice bark back, telling them to shut up. When the dogs kept at it, the owners’ voice barked some more, too. A moment after that, I saw a muzzle-flash and then heard the delayed report from the man’s gun. Was he shooting at me? Was he shooting at the dogs? Whatever the guy was doing, another muzzle flash and its accompanying blast let me know that he was doing it again. What should I do now? Should I duck, or run, or bundle my gear into my car and leave?

The gunshots had the desired effect and quieted the dogs, so I waited a few minutes and went back to my kind of shooting. For this “shot”, I used a canon rather than a gun. That “canon” was my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Several months ago I got it into my head that I’d like to photograph the Milky Way, low in the southwestern sky, setting over the antenna installation atop Nowra Hill, Australia. The site hosts an aircraft radar antenna as well as some small communications towers. Behind the hill is the facility known as HMAS Albatross, aka Naval Air Station Nowra, serving as a military and civilian airport.

I had my opportunity a few weeks back, with the weather, the moon and my availability all synching to beckon me to make the 150 km drive for probably my last Milky Way shoot for the year. For once I had enough time before dark to scout the location, so I used the “PhotoPills” app on my phone to line up exactly where the Milky Way would be setting.

Despite my planning–and even having time for dinner before the shooting was to start–I didn’t account for one thing. The airfield itself, behind the hill, has lots and lots of bright, white lights that provide visibility for humans. That light shines in every direction, including upwards, I realised after looking at some test shots. Even the lights installed to point towards the ground contributed to an enormous light bloom in the sky, as their beams bounced off of the white concrete and back upwards. So, although I managed to get some Milky Way detail in my photos, most of the good stuff was lost in the light.

This photo is a single shot image, taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Canon 40mm f/2.8 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 1600.

Based on the countryside surrounding the inland city of Goulburn, Australia, rural life in the 19th century seems to have included building a lot of small, local stone churches. As with this image’s subject–St Bartholomew’s Anglican Church at Windellama–photographing these old, purpose-built community focal points gets me thinking about what life in the localities that they serve might have been like, and what place worship would have had in the lives of the church members.

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

I don’t know the name or final destination of the driver of the car that provided the foreground lighting for this shot, but if we ever meet, I’ll make sure express my thanks for their efforts. I heard the vehicle coming in the distance and tried to get some glow from the headlights on the tops of the poplars, but mistimed it and got almost a full dose of its high-beam mini-suns.

There’s a subtle tone of green atmospheric airglow in the photo and the dry night, coupled with the deep darkness that this location provided, delivered an almost overdone blast from the Milky Way’s core region. Jupiter and Saturn, the two “gas-giant” planets in our Solar System, can be seen hanging out together in the centre of the frame.

Today’s photo is a single-shot image, taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The motionless blades of this towering turbine give no hint of the force that the wind was flinging at me as I tried to photograph the Milky Way on Saturday night, 26th, October. With the turbine locked into its “stowed” position, the structure looks to be in a peaceful and serene location. In reality, the wind was gusting at around 40 km/h (24 mi/h), making it difficult for me to steady my tripod. After driving about 160 km (100 mi) to get to the spot, near Oberon, Australia, I couldn’t bear the thought of going home with no shots at all, so put up with the southwesterly blast.

Despite the forecast of a cloudless night, some of the dreaded fluffy floating fiends started to move in not long after astronomical twilight ended. Along with the discreet clouds, a higher level of moisture in the air, in general, did its best to filter out a lot of the colours that are usually evident in my Milky Way photos.

For this single-frame photo, I used one of my favourite gear combos, made up of 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 6400.

I love it when atmospheric airglow and the light of the stars are bright enough to silhouette terrestrial objects like these bare trees, which I photographed near Nowra, Australia, in May of 2019.

I shot the two photos with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Dead and decimated, the remnants of a pine tree sit atop the small hill in the grounds of the Pomeroy Uniting Church. Out of shot, a stand of pines acts as a windbreak for the stone sanctuary and a few nearby farms. Low, very low in the southwestern sky hangs the remains of another season of Milky Way chasing, an obsession that has captivated me for the past five years. The bright and white planet Jupiter will kiss the horizon ahead of our galaxy’s central band, seemingly dragging the mass of stars, dust and gas in its wake.

Although my photo looks like it’s a single-frame image, I used two overlapping shots to create the final composition. The 50 mm lens that I used is like a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks photons out of the sky and onto the camera’s sensor. That feature made this my optic of choice for capturing the Milky Way’s light and colours. However, the framing that I had in mind for the image couldn’t be achieved with a single photo, so using this lens required a two-shot overlapping and stitched photo.

That lens is my Yongnuo 50 mm f/1.4 unit, which was attached to a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera. I had set the lens to a little less than its maximum aperture at f/1.8, using an exposure time of 8 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Since reviving my interest in the nightscape photography craft, back in late 2013, I've shot over 95% of my images at locations south of my home in Sydney, Australia. As I live on the southern outskirts of my city, it makes sense to head south for my shoots.

I do break out of that mould sometimes, though. Early in October of 2019, I drove northwest of Sydney to the rural location of Bilpin, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. A small, thin cloud wafted across Jupiter's place in the sky as I started shooting. This misty morsel gave the planet a wider and brighter appearance in this photo than it seemed to my eyes. The Milky Way's core was following Jupiter towards the western horizon, grazing the tops of the tall eucalypts at the edge of the Mountain Lagoon.

I could have captured this scene with a single image, but opted for a 5-shot vertical panorama, using a 50 mm lens fitted to my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera. I set the aperture to f/2.0 and exposed the photo for 6.0 seconds. I had the camera's ISO set to 6400.

Jupiter had partially slipped below the tree line only a few seconds before I captured this photo. You can see it peeking above the trees, halfway down and about 1/3 in from the left of the shot. The Milky Way's galactic core is the dominant feature in the top of the photo. Our galaxy's centre is a beautiful sight, with its bright mass of stars contrasting against the dark dust lanes that look like dirty smoke in the night sky. When the Milky Way is low to the horizon like this, it's hard to get a sharp and well-defined image, but I think I did OK.

I captured this image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Last Saturday night (28th September) was the first time in five weeks that I’d been out for a nightscape photo session. Having such a long gap between shoots was hard enough of itself, but knowing that Milky Way season is almost at its end for 2019 made the wait all the more difficult. I’ve been out twice more since Saturday, so have plenty of images in-store to post this month.

Today’s photo was shot from the second of those three outings, when I drove to an area west of Nowra, Australia. You can see how low in the west the core of the Milky Way was when I set up and took this shot, not long after 9:30 pm. The planet Jupiter was unmissable, positioned almost in the centre of my photo.

After so long between sessions, I’m surprised that I could remember how to set up and shoot at all. I managed to get it all together, though, using 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.

Looking at this photo, I realise that this is a windmill that doesn't mill in the wind any longer. The rotor blades are twisted out of shape, and the beast's tail is laying askew at the tower's base. It's one dead and forsaken device, but that makes for a better photo, I think. The relic is located near Goulburn, Australia.

An air ambulance en route to one of my state's other rural centres left its light-trail on the photo, to the right of the windmill. Since the air ambulance is as much a part of rural life as are the fields, fences and farming paraphernalia in the photo, I left the light-trail in the image.

I employed my Canon EOS 6D camera, fitted with Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8 to capture this single-frame photo, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

This 160-year-old church, sitting atop a hillock west of Goulburn, Australia, looks at home under the lights of the Milky Way, I think. I had the site to myself when I visited recently, giving me the freedom to create a composition that contrasts the little building with the immense universe around it.

I lit the outside of the sanctuary with an LED bank that I'd set to a warm (yellowish) colour temperature. To create the light shining from within the church, I used two other LED panels that were set to give off a very pure white light. The building was designed to look good from the outside. It's the light from within that should make a church known to its community.

This photo is a single-frame image that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The title of this photo describes the position of the Milky Way and Jupiter above the bare poplar trees here alongside the Princes Highway near Bodalla, Australia. The phrase also applies to the fact that I was out shooting photos at 2:00 on a Monday morning. After this, I would have only a few hours sleep, then have to drive for over four hours to get back to Sydney for a client appointment. The dividing line between dedication and obsession becomes less distinct each time I cross it!

I didn’t do any stitching, stacking, or blending for this photo. The shot is a single-frame capture, taken using my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400. Lighting was provided by a Litra Pro LP1200 bi-colour LED unit, hand-held by yours truly.

The same natural process that makes the daylight sky look blue–Rayleigh scattering–works just as well to give a blue hue to a moonlit night. Although our eyes can only see this colour when the Moon is very bright and the air clear, photographs like this one show the blue up quite well.

On the night that I shot today's photo, I could barely see the sand and grass behind the beach, despite how bright things look here. There's a patch of moonlight visible on the sand, and you can see that some of the waves are lit up as well.

The Milky Way is visible in my photo, with some of its colours pushing through that same background blue. I also captured the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars in the picture, towards the centre of the frame. As it had been a while since I'd featured myself in a photo, I walked out onto the sands of Seven Mile Beach at Gerroa, Australia, and stood in the right place to be seen, but without stealing the show.

Once again, I made use of my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera to shoot the sky for you. I had the camera fitted with a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 3200.

As I have mentioned a few times recently, I am longing to get out of home, and back under the celestial canopy, once the authorities lift the COVID-19 restrictions. The Milky Way’s galactic core, replete with stars, gas and immense clouds of dust, had risen to its highest point in the night sky when I photographed it earlier this year at Gerroa, on the southeast coast of New South Wales, Australia. I want to see this again!

With today being Easter Sunday for the majority of Christians worldwide, a common greeting is to say “He is risen”, to which the proper response is “He is risen, indeed!” If you identify with the Christian faith, another faith, or have no belief in God at all, please take the time to look up at the sky tonight. Use that moment to consider the blessings in your life, particularly the people that you live with, those whom you work with, and the ones you see in passing during each day. As much as you can, be thankful that you are sharing your life with them at this time.

This photo of the Milky Way was taken by me with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The region of the sky featured in my image crosses the constellations of Scorpio and Ophiuchus. In the lower-left quarter of the shot is the area of space known as the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex, a dark nebula of gas and dust in which new stars are being formed. Look at those colours! There are so many wonders for us to behold.

I created this image by shooting thirteen six-second long pictures of the sky, plus eleven "dark" frames. The dark frames are used to help reduce the digital noise in the image when all of the photos are combined in a software process called stacking. To capture each one of those twenty-four frames I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

This photo from Tirrannaville, Australia, is a mix of things industrial and natural. The industrial components are impossible to miss–the silos and adjacent generator unit, plus the power pylons and high-tension cables on the left, all backlit by the blaring lights from the nearby Wakefield Park speedway. The green fields behind the silos and the dominating presence of the rising Milky Way can be seen playing their part for the “natural” team.

This photo is the fourth shot that I’ve posted, on consecutive days, from one night of photography that I did in April of 2019. All up, I made a round-trip of nearly 600 km (372 mi) in my car, stopping at five different locations that night. Yeah, I was tired the next day. There had been no sign of any clouds on my drive to this first location. As you can see from the photo, there were plenty of clouds in the sky when I arrived. Within an hour, though, they were headed off to the eastern horizon and didn’t interfere with any other shots.

As with the other three photos I’ve posted from that trip, I took this single-frame image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera. I chose my Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens for the shot, with the aperture set at f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The little plaque on the front of this stone church at Big Hill, NSW, Australia, reads: “1878. To Commemorate Centenary. BIG HILL CHURCH. 1978”. With us now being in 2020, the church has occupied its plot of land for 142 years. While not every night in that time would have been cloud-free, the building has nonetheless seen plenty of dark and starry skies during those years.

Although there was a hint of fog in the sky when I arrived at Big Hill on my visit in April of 2019, by the time I was taking this & a few other shots of the church, the night had cleared up completely. Jupiter was riding high above the scene, next to the Milky Way’s core, and a touch of atmospheric airglow gave the sky the slightly green colour you see here.

The photo is a single-frame shot, taken with 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.

Another photo from my 2019 trove, I captured today’s image on an empty and quiet rural road near Goulburn, Australia. I should correct that first sentence. There was no traffic about, and no hint of wind to create any rustling of leaves in the treetops. There was one noise that persisted, though. I could hear the sound for the whole of the 45 minutes that I took photos along the straight stretch of road. Those barking dogs were set on annoying me, I reckoned, and they did their best to make sure that any people within earshot would wonder if they should go out to see what the problem was.

Luckily, nobody ended up coming to see me and ask what I was doing, lurking in the dark at 2:00 am. I was left to myself to photograph the Milky Way and the planet Jupiter as they rode high in the sky, with the green background of atmospheric airglow to colour the celestial scene. In the distance, towards the road’s vanishing point, the Small Magellanic Cloud hung low in the sky that was slightly yellowed by the light pollution from the city of Canberra.

This photograph is a single-frame image that I captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

When I shot this photo, in mid-April of 2019, I aimed to make the foreground foliage and the galactic core of the Milky Way seem to be only a matter of metres apart. In reality, that gap from the treetops to the stars, dark dust and gas structures at the centre of our galaxy is around 27,000 light-years. Somewhat closer to us here on Earth is the planet Jupiter–glowing white here through a slight haze that moistened the Autumn air–orbiting our Sun at an average distance of 760 million kilometres.

Due to the way that I lit the foreground, the pine tree that was closest to the camera looks very bright and has taken on the yellow tone that my LED lantern was putting out. I see those golden branches as the petals of a flower, with the taller tree canopy and the band of the Milky Way making up the stellar stamen, dispensing photons of pollen into the night. The location was Big Hill, New South Wales, Australia.

All of that is opinion and art. The facts of the photo are that it was taken with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I did a lot of astronomy & night sky photography back in my teen years in the late 1970s & early 80s. After that, I kept an interest in things astronomical, but I devoted my photography sessions to subjects more earthly. Note to self: why didn't you try to photograph Halley's Comet in 1986?

It wasn't until 2013 that I pointed my Digital SLR camera towards the skies, after being inspired by Aussies such as Mike Salway and Mark Gee. As it turns out, I discovered this weekend that my memories of that personal photographic history were flawed. While looking through photos from 2009, trying to find some bird photos that I remember being pleased with, I found ten images that had I'd shot in October of that year. These ten frames were all captured with my Canon EOS 350D camera, using a 50 mm "nifty fifty" lens.

I recall taking the camera outside at our holiday house at Tuross Head, Australia, which is the place where I shot lots of my film-based photos back in the day. Fuzzy as my memory is, I have a few flashbacks about not putting much time into the shots and guessing at the settings I'd need to capture some of the colours in the stars. When I loaded the images onto my Mac and looked at them in Apple's "Aperture" software, I was disappointed at what I saw but didn't delete the files, in case I might come back to them one day.

Now, with lots of knowledge about shooting and editing nightscape photos, and with editing tools that weren't available those eleven years ago, I've been able to see what I captured. Not only did I photograph stars, but I also shot lots of Milky Way dust lands and gas clouds, plus the purple colours that signify the presence of the Triffid and Lagoon nebulae.

The photo was taken with Canon EOS 350D camera, fitted with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens @ f/2.5, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 800.

My first Milky Way photography outing for 2020 took place in the very early hours of the 1st of February at Cathedral Rocks near Kiama, Australia. This night turned out to be one of the hottest and most humid nights of this summer, resulting in a hazy sky that made it hard to get sharp, clear photos. I had two additional challenges that night. The first was a regular foe, that of tiredness. We’d been to a wedding earlier in the evening but with the skies forecast to be clear for just this night, then clouded out for at least a week, I took on the tiredness challenge. The other thing, or things, that I had working against me had wings–mosquitoes. There were lots and lots of mosquitoes.

There was one more factor that ended up being more of a help than the challenge I initially thought it would be. A man bearing a bright light came walking across the sand from the parkland behind the beach. I called out to him, flashed my LED headlamp, then called out again, but he didn’t respond. My concern was that his light would ruin the shot that I was in the middle of taking, but it turned out to enhance it. There is a white streak along the base of the cliff at the right-hand side of my shot. This glow shows where the torch-bearer made his way across the sand and onto the rock platform.

For this single-frame photo, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

For about a month now I’ve been enviously enjoying Milky Way core photos by friends and other photographers on social media. It wasn’t until the first of February that I was able to get out for a shoot, and then it’s taken me over three weeks to find time to edit and post any of the photos.

My first Milky Way shoot for 2020 was at the same location as my first for 2019, Cathedral Rocks near Kiama, Australia. As with plenty of my expeditions, I was greeted by a partly-cloudy sky at the end of my long drive (90 km/56 mi). That meant I didn’t get to photograph the Milky Way until the clouds had cleared away, nearly an hour after arriving. The up-side was that I snapped some shots like this one that included colours in the pre-dawn sky. The planet Jupiter is the brightest object visible in my photo left of centre in the lower half of the shot. Another of the planets, Mars, is lurking near the top-left corner.

This image is a single-frame photo that I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Canon 40mm f/2.8 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Oops! It wasn’t my intention to light up the rocks for this photo, although I did mean to light them up. I kind of forgot that I was shooting a time-lapse, while I was flicking about with my torch to see if there were any fish swimming around the rocks. Yes, I did see some fish swimming around the rocks. [Oh, for those who still use Imperial units, a “torch” is what you’d call a “flashlight”… even when it’s not flashing]. This shot is one of the 440 images that I captured for the time-lapse, which I’ve posted here recently.

The photo worked out OK, showing off the rocks under the surface of the Shoalhaven River at North Nowra, Australia. I also captured the stars reflected on the water’s surface; the slightly moonlit shore on the western bank of the river; plus Jupiter and the Milky Way hanging in the sky, just above the tree line. It was a peaceful scene to take in as I sat listening to the water moving with the outgoing tide.

I shot this single-frame photo with a 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.

Despite the yellowed horizon and the colourfully bright sky here in my photo, you can still see the wisps of dark gas and the dust lanes that characterise the galactic core region of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. I can understand why you probably think the brightness of the background is due to the Sun's light because this does look like a post-sunset scene.

However, the time was 4:58 am when I captured this scene at Tuross Lake, Australia, eleven mornings ago, making it a mere eight minutes since the Moon had set for the day. Glowing at 93% illumination, and only two days from being full, there was still lots of the Moon's light on display for my camera to capture, giving the image a near-daylight look. Yes, you can blame it on the moonlight, it seems.

Less than fifteen minutes later the moonlight was gone, too, and the sky had darkened enough for me to shoot some of my usual Milky Way core scenes, but only for around half an hour, after which the real twilight would begin.

As with most of my favourite shots from this wintry morning session, I captured this scene 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 1600.

I almost deleted the original of this shot, which was in landscape format and didn’t seem balanced. Cropping it down to the square aspect-ratio made me see it differently. The angled, bare branch at the very top of the towering trunk appears to be reaching across space to the strand of dark interstellar dust in the sky, whose shape is a mirror-image of the spindly limb’s form.

None of the trees on Earth, no matter how tall, will ever touch the stars, but I love it when they try!

I shot this single-frame image near Seven Mile Beach, New South Wales, Australia, with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Judging by the ratio of rust to metal on the dozer in my photo, and the amount of greenery growing around it, it’s some time since it has moved. I guess it takes a lot of imagination to think of it moving heaven or earth. Despite that, l think my caption is fitting.

The section of Milky Way that is hanging in the sky over the dozer includes an arrangement of stars–an “asterism”–that’s familiar to people like me who live in the Southern Hemisphere. That asterism is the Southern Cross, in the constellation of Crux, and I think it’s the feature of the heavens that I tend to look for first when I’m outside at night. The intensely bright glow behind the tractor is light pollution spilling out from the rural city of Nowra, Australia, a few kilometres south of where I captured the photo at Jaspers Brush airstrip. You can see the two Magellanic Cloud galaxies in the lower half of the scene, not too far above the tree at the left.

I shot the photo last Sunday night, 14th June, using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, with an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The planets Jupiter and Saturn were low in the eastern sky when I shot this image last Sunday night, 14th Jun 2020. These two “gas giants” are a feature of the early-evening eastern sky at present. They’re a little below the centre of my photo, between the trees and not very high over the horizon. I composed the scene so that the Milky Way’s familiar stretch of stars, gas and interstellar dust dominates the sky in the top half of the photo.

The small cattle-yard in the foreground struck me for its confused and thrown-together look, which seems to be sympathetic to the hotchpotch of demountable buildings and derelict vehicles further back in my shot. I like the haphazard feel of this farm scene, especially as it is contrasted with the patterns and order of the constellations passing overhead.

This image is a single-frame photo that I captured near Nowra, Australia, with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.5, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

For over 60,000 years, the indigenous peoples of my country, Australia, have made practical use of their knowledge of the night sky. In western or classical astronomy, the recognisable patterns in the heavens–the “constellations”–consist of imaginary shapes that are loosely formed around prominent groupings of stars.

To the Wiradjuri people and several other indigenous nations, the constellations were instead marked out by the dark gas and dust clouds visible in the Milky Way. One of these constellations is called the Great Celestial Emu, aka the Celestial Emu or the Dark Emu. For my international followers who aren’t familiar with Australia’s fauna, an emu is a large, flightless bird. The second-largest living bird after its relative the ostrich, the emu is endemic to Australia and can be found across most of our country’s mainland. I have marked the rough outline of an emu on my photo, showing you where in the sky it can be seen.

According to @astrokirsten Kirsten Banks, Wiradjuri woman, astrophysicist and PhD candidate, the Great Celestial Emu was significant because “the emu’s position in the sky signals at what point during the year is best for emu egg collection. When the emu, known as Gugurmin in Wiradjuri language, is on the eastern horizon just after sunset, this indicates that the emus are currently nesting. So, at this time there are no emu eggs to collect. Later in the year, Gugurmin makes its way up higher into the sky. Once its body is directly overhead after sunset, it’s time to go collect emu eggs.”

As well as the emu you can see a more earthly form at the lower right-hand corner, the green arc from a fisherman’s glow-float he cast it into the water at Black Head Reserve, Gerroa, Australia.

To shoot this single-frame photo I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, with an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

One of my photography goals for 2020 was only to post images that I shot this year and to try to use photos that I'd shot within a month or two of when I post them. I've only been out three times to photograph the night sky since the 1st of January and didn't end up with many photos at all. With the full moon less than a week away, and rain forecast for at least the next week anyway, I'm going to have to start posting shots from previous years pretty soon.

Before that happens, I offer you another shot from last week's visit to the ocean rock platform at Gerroa, on the south coast of my state of New South Wales, Australia. Taken with a 50 mm lens, the photo offers a zoomed-in look at the Milky Way's galactic core and its reflection in the tidal pools that cover the siltstone and sandstone outcrop. When you view celestial objects through the atmosphere so low on the horizon, they don't appear as sharp or as vivid as when you see them higher up in the sky. That accounts for why the Milky Way's core doesn't look as detailed and distinct as in photos taken when it's overhead. I hope you enjoy viewing the picture as I've presented it.

The photo is a single-frame image, captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Wriggling and blue, the streak of reflected light beaming from the most massive planet in our Solar System, Jupiter, grabs your eye as you look upon this photo. The stars, dust lanes and dark nebulae of the Milky Way look like a huge dirty smudge across the horizon, ready to set for another daily cycle.

There was almost no breeze at all when I shot this photo on July 3 this year, in the short but productive 50-minute period of darkness between the setting of the almost-full moon and the beginning of astronomical twilight. If you zoom in on the image, you can see sharp and distinct reflections on the lake of several stars low on the horizon.

This image is a single-frame photo that I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

These tidal pools on the rock shelf at Black Head Point, Gerroa, Australia, are popular with small fish, crabs and other molluscs that feed and breed when the waters wash in. They also make great mirrors for reflecting the light of stars, planets, and the vast gas and dust structures in the Milky Way. It continually amazes me that the light from the Milky Way’s galactic core can travel the 27,000-odd light-years between its location and us here on earth, but still have enough energy to be reflected from the surface of a watery mirror.

Over on the right, you can see the light from a headlamp worn by one of the men who were fishing from the southeast end of the headland’s shelf. These guys fish with green-glowing floats on their lines, which make a colourful arc in photos as they cast their lines. If you time it right you can get a green arc without the glare of the headlamp. Obviously, I didn’t time things right because I got a bit of an arc but more of the bright, white light the fisherman was wearing.

I shot this single-frame image using 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 planets Jupiter and Saturn were hanging low in the eastern sky, their reflections gleaming so brightly off the surface of the Tasman Sea, when I shot this photo back before “lockdown” became part of our everyday vocabulary. The sinewy driftwood provided a natural sculpture, a set-piece that drew the line between mortal me sitting on Seven Mile Beach (New South Wales, Australia) and the infinite beyond. The majestic presence of the Milky Way was dominating the heavens, like an intricate tapestry hanging on the wall of a cathedral or castle.

For almost as long as I can remember, I have been like the character of Vincent (or Jerome, his alter-ego) in the movie “Gattaca”, always longing for the stars, ever looking upwards. With beauties like this to behold, can you blame me?

The photo is a single-frame image that I captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I captured this scene during my first post-isolation nightscape photo trip last Friday night, 29th June. If not for the light of the waxing Moon that was a few hours from setting over the mountains west of Jaspers Brush, NSW, Australia, most of the landscape you see in the shot would be in darkness. The dusky-coloured central band of the Milky Way was well on its way up the eastern sky, bright enough to show itself through the partly-moonlit night.

The two most massive planets in our Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn, were trailing the Milky Way on its journey across the heavens, shining so brightly that you can see their orbs reflected from the surface of the agricultural irrigation channel in the foreground. Since the Moon’s light is reflected sunlight, all of the earthly elements in the photo have the same colours as they when lit by the Sun during the daytime. If only our human eyes could see these colours and features between sunset and sunrise, perhaps we all might spend more time outdoors during those hours!

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

I’ve not visited this picnic area during the daytime. Still, I can guess that it’s a popular destination, being only about a 160-metre walk to Seven Mile Beach (why didn’t that get renamed when Australia went metric?) in New South Wales, Australia. It’s somewhere I’ll have to visit again once our leaders lift the COVID-19 travel restrictions. A few wallabies were hopping around looking for food on the night that I shot here earlier this year, but as best as I could tell, I was the only one present who was doing any stargazing.

The Milky Way was a superb sight, and I couldn’t miss the brightness of the planet Jupiter as its light blasted out from just over the top of a tall eucalypt. The distinct green tone of the sky that the photo has captured, caused by atmospheric airglow, was only visible as a greyish glow to my ageing eyes. I would love it if we could see these colours in real-time, and wonder if that might get more people out to see what it is people like me find so fascinating when we look up at night.

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