Astro
At the risk of stating the obvious, there’s something literally cosmic about being out beneath the stars. Even our friendly home planet seems otherworldly when every rustle of the hedgerow or snapping of a twig is magnified into something altogether more primal. And that’s before we go full-on psychedelic by gazing heavenward and considering our infinitesimal role in the universe.
Given such worrying profundity, it’s probably just as well that night-time photography is quite a fiddly business, requiring suitably mundane levels of attention. And even if fully attentive, I must admit that my humble Fuji X-T3 - with its crop sensor - is not ideal for low-light work.
Never mind; there’s still much stellar fun to be had… :-)
Garden Star Trails
(2020 Lockdown)
Cosmic Highway
(Jupiter and the M5, Devon)
(Up Close and Personal!)
Partial Solar Eclipse (or Celestial Jaffa Cake?)
Crescent Moon
Kildonan by Moonlight (Arran Seashore)
Arran’s ‘Spooky Mansion’ (with Ghostly Cat!)
Chapel of Rest -
The Sunday House
(Gerrans, Cornwall)
Lonely Planets
Boscastle Evening Afterglow… Jupiter and Venus in Conjunction over the North Cornish Coast
The Obelisk (A Stellar Night Out!)
Wellington Monument, atop Somerset’s Blackdown Hills, is the tallest three-sided obelisk in the world.
It commemorates the Duke of Wellington’s victory at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo… where, as the song succinctly states, “Napoleon did surrender”.
Intriguingly, many of the background stars are so far away that we’re seeing them long before Napoleon - or his erstwhile beau, Joséphine - were starry twinkles in anyone’s eye! ;-)
Late to the Lightshow (Isle of Arran)
I arrived one night too late for the Northern Lights - though their absence reveals a Crescent Moon over Lamlash Bay!
Cycle of Life - The Fallen Tree
Nocturnal Treescapes (a.k.a. Arboreal Nightscapes)
I’m not sure that Nocturnal Treescapes are actually a ‘thing’, but it seems to be an effective way of describing some of the night-time images which I’ve gravitated towards while out after dark in my local Devon countryside.
These may not be true ‘astro’ shots in the sense that the main (torch-lit) subject is in the foreground, yet I enjoy trying to capture that juxtaposition of Earth and Cosmos.
The gallery below is from two separate photoshoots, hopefully illustrating the different feel between summer at The Three Apostles (the first four shots) and winter at The Hobbit Tree (the final two). They are all single exposures of around 15 seconds - except for the concluding image, in which multiple frames have been blended together to generate 30-minute star trails… :-)
A ‘Tall Tree’ Tribute… to conclude this brief look at Arboreal Nightscapes, I’ll return to the above Cycle of Life and Faraway Tree motifs to relate a slightly more poignant tale.
During late April of 2024, we discovered that the raggedy old tree behind our house - a local landmark and great wildlife haven - would get the chop after failing a medical. The hastily-arranged ‘astro’ shoot which followed was therefore quite a bittersweet affair, effectively commemorating the tree’s last night standing proud beneath the stars! :-(
This ‘circle of life’ moment also brings the current Astro page full circle, as the same tree can be glimpsed in my opening image - ‘Garden Star Trails (2020 Lockdown)’ - which initiated these modest yet meaningful ‘nightscape’ adventures…
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