One of the things I hate most about living where I do is the light pollution. Even on a dark, clear night, the sky is still tainted by a faint orange glow, and the plethora of streetlights makes shooting the stars difficult.
At Portmahomack however, there were no such issues, and provided I turned my camera away from the handful of lights which lit the lane behind the cottage, I was in almost perfect darkness.
I'm still very much a beginner when it comes to astrophotography, but I feel like I'm getting better with each passing year, though keeping the stars sharp and in focus is still tricky. I don't have a shutter release, so I'm relying entirely on the self-timer feature which works fine, but has an unskippable ten second timer which rather drags the shoot on.
The Milky Way above was incredibly clear and I will admit to just standing and staring at it for several long minutes as my eyes adjusted to the starlight. It never fails to awe when you realise your total insignificance in the face of the wider universe.
I think these are the best photos I've ever taken of stars.
I greyscaled the one above to see if it made the stars pop any better.
At one point I noticed a plane flying over just as the shutter opened and to my amusement, had managed to capture it in flight! Long exposures ftw!
I repositioned the camera to get it intentionally this time. The two colours are the different lights flashing in sequence as it flies.
The foreground here was super saturated by a nearby light source, hence the irn bru colouration.
The greyscale version isn't much better tbh.
I noticed this really glowy yellow area on a couple of other photographs and I'm now wondering if it might be a galaxy? I didn't get anything sharper I'm afraid but it's so noticeably different from the rest.
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| Halfway down on the left hand side |
At one point I spotted a shooting star/meteor which was a nice surprise, and I think I *might* have caught another one on camera too. It's not a great image as I was still messing with the focus at that point, but I hadn't touched the camera between the two shots so it isn't something I've done!
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| Right at the bottom, you'd need to embiggen it. |
I gifed it so you can see it better but even then it's a little tricky to make out!
As I said, I'm still very much a novice at this, but I'm super pleased by the way these shots turned out!
Tune in next for the final day at Portmahomack....but not the end by far!
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