Star Light

 This is another first for me, but something I will definitely try again, especially now the nights are darker for longer. I just have to hope for more clear skies.

This is a circular star trail (the second image is cropped to remove some of the distracting foreground) taken in the Forest of Bowland last night.

It is a stacked image using 135 individual  30 second exposures so in all this is a 70 minute exposure  which I shot over a 2 hour 20 minute time period.

Next time I will use a shorter period between shots and use a higher number of images to hopefully create even smoother more complete trails.

In the cropped image I have adjusted the colour density a little to bring out some of the colours that we would normally not see.

Night Skies 3

 

Normally when I go out with my camera for  3 or 4 hours I will come back with hundreds of shots and several that I will want to share via this blog. However, when I went out to photograph the night sky I was left with effectively just two views one to the south with the headland illuminated by the beam from the lighthouse and a second facing west taking in the lighthouse itself and the skies above. Not a lot for the time and effort you might think, but actually I learned a lot from this trip and I am very pleased with the images I got. If you look at the posts over the last two days you will see some of the better images and today I have posted my favourite images from the night.

Firstly you have the view to the south, this was a 90 second tracked exposure (ISO 1600, 17mm F/4.0). The bright orange star slightly above the horizon and slightly to the left is Antares, the 15th brightest star in our night sky and the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpio. If you can zoom in you will see the other stars in Scorpio fanning outwards. Above that you have the constellation of Libra, and then above that slightly to the right is the bright white star Arcturus the brightest star in Bootes. 

I know it is hard to make things out and so I am aided by a neat app called Stellarium and another called Star Walk 2 which help to nicely map the sky and get my bearings on what is where. Stellarium is great because I can go back to the sky map for the exact date and time I was there and it takes out the guesswork.

In the second image, which I love, we have the lighthouse casting its beam into the Irish Sea. We are looking west and in the sky above the lighthouse we can see the constellation of Leo, the two bright stars in the centre sitting almost horizontally to each other mark the top of the constellation they are Denebola and Zosma and then towards the top of the frame almost directly above is a lovely cluster of stars, which are part of Coma Berenices, they just have numbers instead of names (eg 12 Comae Berenices).

I don't know about you but I am fascinated by the night sky, just being there in the early hours, despite the biting cold, it was a real treat to be able to look up at the vastness of space and to be able to see so many celestial bodies and to marvel at the beauty that we so rarely get to see.

Night Skies 1

ISO 3200, 19mm f/4.0  30 secs 

ISO 3200,  19mm f/4.0  120secs (4x 30 sec images stacked)

ISO 2500, 17mm F/4.0  120sec

ISO 1600  17mm  F/4.0  60 sec

 Last Friday (25th March 2022), with the promise of clear skies I decided to go in search of some stars. 

I went to South Stacks on Anglesey, and although I had planned to go by myself I was pleased to have my brother with me as it is quite remote and it was pitch black. It was also good as we were both experimenting with astrophotography so we could bounce ideas off each other and share some of the excitement of seeing so many stars.

I took some shots of the sky above our head but the problem with that is I have no means of identifying exactly what I was looking at and I had set my lens at 40mm by mistake so I didn't really have a wide enough view for the shots to be of any great interest. I did however get some good shots looking across the sea, some facing south west with the lighthouse in the shot (which I will share tomorrow) and these which are facing due south and capture the headland illuminated by the passage of the beam from the lighthouse.

The first shot as you will see was a 30 second exposure and the second shot is a stack of 4 identical images with the same settings so giving a combined exposure of 2 minutes. By stacking the images (in some software called Sequator) it is possible to reduce the level of noise in the image and sharpen up the star images.

The third and fourth images are single exposures but they are tracked images in that I had mounted my camera on a star tracking mount which rotates the camera to compensate for the rotation of the earth and so keep the stars aligned so I can get sharp images of the stars (rather than smudged lines) without having to stack images. If I had stacked several of these images it would have been possible to get even sharper and less noisy images (I should have reduced the ISO for these shots too but I am still learning so I will bear that in mind for next time). With the 2 minute exposure the foreground image is too blurry for my liking and I think the 60 second exposure is probably the limit.

However I have to say I am very happy with these images. Just standing under the night sky there were so many stars visible but by using the long exposure and the tracking mount it was possible to capture so many more stars than are visible to the naked eye. As the night wore on (we were there from 1:30 to 4:30am) and dawn approached we could track the movement of stars across the horizon and you can see that in the pictures above. For example in the first image the bright orange star at the centre of the horizon is Antares but in the subsequent images it has moved up and to the left.

The bright glow to the lower left is not light pollution but is the light from distant galaxies and nebulae and this all just blows my mind at the vastness and beauty of the universe.

Please look out for some different images tomorrow and then after that I will post my favourite two images from this great night out.