Starry, Starry Night

First of all, a spoiler. The last photo in this post is a very special one. It's not one of mine and in of itself it is unremarkable but its importance can't be understated. More later.

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At bloody last. For over one and a half years I had been waiting and I was finally going to get a chance. For 18 months I had been waiting to be in a rural location with a clear, cloud-free night. My goal was to take pictures of the stars and so I needed to be somewhere rural so as to avoid light pollution and I needed it to be cloudless for, well, obvious reasons. 

I am passionate about stars and the cosmos they sit in. I read more about physics, and astronomy in particular, than any other topic; more than the biology of my day job and the photography of my spare time. Asides from their preternatural beauty I love that they give up so many of their secrets simply by our study of the electro-magnetic radiation they give off; of which the visible light we can see is but one segment.

Within about 17 minutes of the Big Bang nearly all of the matter and anti-matter initially created in the universe had annihilated each other and left only hydrogen (75%) and helium (25%); all the other elements of the periodic table, which today make up about 2% of the matter in the universe, was created in the extreme conditions found inside stars where the intense temperature and pressure literally fuses protons together. What this means is that every single thing you can see is made of atoms that were created in the inferno of a star - we are all made of star dust.

In my first two photos here I have tried to capture the Milky Way, running top to bottom through the centre of the picture, with mixed success. The first one probably shows it most clearly but the exposure was a bit on the long side (188 seconds) so the stars are starting to move; they're in an awkward stage where they're not in sharp focus but they're not drawn out enough to be a proper star trail so it just looks a bit blurry, which isn't great. But I do like the garden being in the bottom of the frame as it gives the shot some context and sense of scale. What did surprise me was the orange glow in the lower portion of the sky, there was no hint of that with the naked eye. It looks as if I'm still in London and there is a city's worth of light pollution just around the corner but the nearest street light was about half a mile away in a small village, the nearest town was over 4 miles away; and yet there is still so much light pollution.

I tried to address the glow with the second picture by not including the horizon and pointing the camera straight up into the sky which seemed to do the trick although the exposure, again, is a little too long at 147 seconds.

The picture I was most pleased with was this next one, which was the first I took. I ended up taking five photos in all over the course of an hour starting at about 3am. Given this was my first attempt and, if I'm honest, I was quite drunk, I think it's not too bad. This was a long exposure of just over 9 minutes and so that nasty orange glow is back but this time the stars have moved enough for it to give a proper star trail effect. Next time I'm going to see if a soft ND grad filter will help with the orange cast at all. I deliberately aimed at Polaris to get a pin wheel effect; Polaris remains motionless in the centre and all the other stars have an increased degree of movement as they radiate out. What I really like about this photo is how the long streaks allow you to see the actual colour of the stars for what they are; very few are white, most of them are blue or a yellow/orange colour which you just can't make out with the naked eye. If you're reading this on your phone then you might struggle to make out the detail, I recommend having a proper look at home on your laptop (does anyone still have a desk top these days), click on the picture to engalactify it.

Overall I was quite pleased with how the session went, I learnt a lot. Hopefully I won't have to wait so long for my next chance to refine my technique. Next month we are going to Iceland and if there are clear skies then there will be a decent chance of seeing the aurora borealis so no prizes for guessing what I'll be blogging about in October.

I'm going to end this post with that special photo I promised you. It is a photo taken by a machine and inspired by one of my personal heroes. The machine was the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the person was Carl Sagan. In 1990 the primary mission was over and he finally persuaded NASA that this was an important image to try and get. NASA were reluctant as they would effectively have to point the camera at the sun and they were afraid it would fry it and, also, there was no scientific merit in the endeavour. Sagan knew better, though. You can see the Earth halfway down the brown streak on the right hand side. It is a pale blue dot (as this photo is now known) only  0.12 pixels in size; the streak itself is lens flare from the sun. This photo of our planet was taken by a man made object from 6 billion km away. Think about that; it's amazing. We did that. I'll let Dr. Sagan close up.....

'From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.'

Dr. Carl Sagan

Pelicans

The blue buoys in the background are markers for an oyster farm

Here is a set of images I took nearly three years ago now of a pair of pelicans coming in to land. My wife and I were in a small boat off the coast of Swakopmund, Namibia and the pelicans knew that if they came and said hello they would be rewarded with a few choice mackerel. Taken together the three images give a great sense of the grace and control these birds have as they come in to land, but, we almost missed the opportunity all together....

The town of Swakopmund, (one of my favourite place names of all time, right up there with Saqsayhuaman and Fingringhoe) can be found about half way up Namibia's long Atlantic coast line almost directly west of the capital Windhoek. It's a curious little town, a bit like, I imagine, stepping back into 1970s East Germany. Not in a Stasi, Eastern Bloc kind of way but in a way that brought to mind what Germany might have been like without the burden of mass industry and high technology. You see, during the Scramble for Africa we got South Africa, Egypt, the Sudan and others; Belgium got what is now the DRC; the French got much of the north west of the continent and Germany got a portion down in the south west of Africa which they called, with typical Teutonic imagination, German South West Africa, now known as Namibia. The result of this was a little slice of Bavaria in the desert on the opposite side of the world.

Streets in Swakopmund have names like Nord Ring, Heuschneider and Mittel Straße and it couldn't be easier to find a cold, European style beer and a stein to drink it out of. Nationally, one third of white Namibians speak German and this proportion is thought to be higher still in Swakopmund. So, pretty German, then. It was for this reason that we were rather worried that we were going to miss our boat trip as Germans don't tend to be keen on tardyness. You see, we were under the impression that we were going to be picked up from our awesome accommodation and taken the 20 miles or so down to Walvis Bay where the trip began; but more than 20 minutes after we expected to be picked up we found out that we were going to have to make our own way there and average a mile per minute in the process. We were on a driving holiday, doing a lap of Namibia and so we had our own wheels but this was still less than ideal. We covered thousands of kilometres on that holiday and more than 90% of it was on gravel roads; luckily this little stretch was 100% lovely black top.

With Sue doing her best Jensen Button impression we made it. Just. But it cost us some light ribbing from the boat load of middle aged German tourists that seemed to punctuate our way around the country, Namibia being quite a popular tourist destination for our Germanic cousins. The main point of the trip was to see the enormous Cape Cross seal colony and, if we were lucky, dolphins; we knew the pelicans would be there but we didn't give them much thought. As we saw them come gliding into view though, through the early morning mist over a perfectly still Atlantic, they had an undeniable majesty to them that let me easily capture a great little series of images.

Another highlight was when a, presumably semi-tame and well rehearsed, male seal climbed up the back of the boat and onto the deck. Now, we were not on a large boat, she was only about 20 feet from bow to stern so to have a 9 foot seal weighing a third of a ton lumbering about was, I admit, a little disquieting. All of a suddenall the human cargo had to pin themselves to the side railings to give this behemoth room to, well, generally stink the place up. If I'm honest, my lasting impression of this encounter nearly three years on, once you've got used to the enormous size and very pointy looking teeth, is that seals really, really stink of fish. I guess he was quite cute in his own way, and he certainly seemed to appreciate his free breakfast.

The last picture I'm going to show you from this trip was one I caught on the fly, so to speak. It still cracks me up every time I see it. I would say that this shows pelicans looking slightly less graceful than in the previous photos and if you look carefully you can just about see a fish below it's beak that had been thrown for it to catch.