Nightscapades
Active Member
The farmer who owns this property, located in the hills southwest of the rural town of Nowra, Australia, happened to come home as I was setting up my camera and tripod. Seeing him move toward the gate, right near where I was lurking in the dark, I uttered “hi there”, but it went unanswered. Upping the volume, I repeated the words. He responded with “hi, watcha up to?” His tone was pleasant, and he seemed friendly, unlike many people who’ve stumbled upon me shuffling around in the shadows. “Taking photos of the stars”, was my brief reply. “Huh. I would have thought they were too far away to take photos of”, he offered, with a cheeky tone.
I had aimed to take photos in which the Milky Way was seeming to stand vertically, stretching from the horizon to the top of the frame. I missed that by about 30 minutes, resulting in our galaxy's starry band of light and dust tipping over a little towards the southwestern side of the sky. The farm’s distance from any significant built-up areas was a boon for a dark sky hunter like myself, allowing me to capture a tremendous amount of detail in the Milky Way’s dust lanes, as well as the distinct deep green colour of the background atmospheric airglow.
You can see Jupiter–our solar system’s most massive planet–shining with a bright, white light at the extreme righthand side of this image. Higher up and across to the left is Mars, at present brighter than Jupiter in the night sky but glowing with a distinctly orange hue. The Magellanic Cloud galaxies hadn’t long risen over the trees near the south-south-eastern horizon, starting another daily circuit of the sky.
I took eleven photographs to make up a vertical panorama to take in this scene, but only ended up using eight of those so that the image wouldn’t be too tall for posting online. Each of the images was shot with a Canon EOS 6D camera, through a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, exposed for 25 seconds @ ISO 6400. The camera was mounted on a Nodal Ninja 3 panoramic head, atop a Manfrotto tripod.
