Even an Annoying Man With A Camera can't annoy stars.
Having lived in UK cities all my life, with all their inevitable light pollution, I didn't really know stars existed, until I visited New Zealand and the Coromandel Peninsula, and I looked up and saw the Milky Way for the first time. WOW - where have I BEEN all my life????
Cameras are not very good at managing extremes of contrast, so where your eye can cope quite happily with a sunlit sky and a landscape, your camera will quite often over expose one or under expose the other. But in astrophotography, they really come into their own. You can look up into a night sky and see maybe 10 stars, but take a photograph of it with even the most rudimentary DSLR and you'll be amazed at what the sensor has picked up.
So we start with this -
And the camera sees this...
This is the same image. To be fair I've faked the effect slightly because obvs I can't demonstrate to you how your eyes work, you are looking at this with them, so I've simulated the effect with the original picture, and the same picture, that has been worked on in Photoshop to enhance the contrast a bit.
I thought this was absolutely mind blowing, and I was pretty impressed with my own handiwork, but a quick search on the internet will show you that these are beginner pictures compared to some images that the big boys (and girls) post on the net. Some of them are actually boys, too - one of the most spectacular shots I've ever seen was posted by a 17 year old who has obviously spent far too much time on his own, and who is headed for a successful career in astrophotography, just as surely as his genetic line will die out with him.
The camera will pick up the faintest points of light, so faint that it will actually pick up stray photons that hit the sensor - and register that as a 'star'. So although this is pretty, it's not that accurate. Some of the stars you're seeing, are not there.
Of course in reality quite a few of the stars you are seeing are not there - they burnt out billions of years ago, but their light just hasn't finished getting to us yet.
There is a whole realm of utter geekdom in astrophotography, not just in the equipment, where surprisingly the actual camera is the cheap bit, but also in the post processing where you truly descend into Astronerdia - however I'll try to chip away at that massive topic in another post.
For this post, I'd like to concentrate on what I had to do to get this shot.
So picture Sutton Bank, a 'dark sky' site about 40 minutes drive away. I had to wait for a clear night, of which there have been, let me see, in 2016, three of them...
In the UK we're blessed with three different weather systems, one coming from the arctic, one from Europe and one from the Atlantic, and they all fight with each other, giving us mostly, well, clouds really. Which is partly why British people are so obsessed with the weather. So actually getting a night that is clear, and REMAINS clear while you drive for 40 minutes to Sutton Bank, is a challenge.
These shots were taken in Summer so, with the long summer days, that means waiting until about 2.00 in the morning to take the shot. It's getting less attractive, isn't it?
So, waiting up until 1.00am, then bundling the tripod, camera, two layers of thermals (yes, I know, in JULY) and a hefty wrench, into my car. The wrench is not actually essential photographic equipment, but a safety precaution which will become obvious shortly.
Finally I arrive at the car park of the Sutton Bank Visitor Centre. I pay my £1.50 car parking charge, even though nobody will ever know I was there, because I had an honest chip embedded at birth.
Interesting thing, waiting in my car in pitch darkness for the sky to clear, is a whole lot creepier than standing outside it. If you have the interior car lights on, all you see outside is a wall of black, harbouring axe murderers, chainsaw wielders, venomous snakes, crocodiles (I have a fertile imagination).
There are strange noises. Some startling - sitting in your car with all the lights off and the doors locked, when you haven't fully read the car manual can, for instance lead to your car alarm going off. More unsettling are these strange dull thump noises coming out the dark woods. Days later I was told these were conkers, dropping off the trees. It was that quiet they sounded like poachers taking pot shots in the dark.
Sutton Bank has an atmosphere all it's own at 2.00am. I'd like to say quiet and peaceful, but peaceful isn't quite the right word. Menacing, threatening, intimidating, 'they found his body in some woodland, drained of blood' those are better words. Now you understand the need for the wrench.
I had driven around up there once in the early hours, trying to make myself feel more comfortable. There are occasional farmsteads up there, usually with a yard lit with one solitary light, and a lot of dark corners and the vague feeling that these premises have witnessed a lot of inbreeding over the centuries, producing a lot of closely related cousins who have an unhealthy interest in chainsaws.
So that didn't make me feel any better.
I set the camera up on the tripod, with a manual wide-angle lens (Samyang, really good optics, completely manual so no autofocus - but autofocus is useless for astrophotography anyway). I used something called the '600 rule' to decide what the exposure should be - it's a calculation based on the focal length of the lens, that will allow you to expose the sensor for the maximum amount of time without getting 'star trails' as the stars move across the sky.
It means that with a wide angle lens you can expose the sensor for about 20 seconds for each picture. It actually takes 40 seconds to take a shot like that because after you've taken it, the camera takes another picture, with exactly the same settings, but without exposing the sensor. This is because the rays of light are so dim that tiny fluctuations in the sensor can appear like photons - so having taken two shots, the camera compares the image shot with the dark shot, and if there are 'stars' on both, it knows the one on the image shot is a fault, and cancels it out.
To take really good astrophotos, photographers use the same technique by shooting sometimes hundreds of photos of the same image, and software can compare all the photos, delete out the anomalies that come from stray photons, atmospheric waves, passing jets, and produce one, much sharper, picture.
This picture is compiled from about 30 photos and has been stacked into one image. Posterity will judge whether it's better than the ones above, but theoretically at least, it SHOULD be a more accurate picture because there shouldn't be any stray photons or faults masquerading as stars.
Canon 70D, Samyang 14mm manual lens, F2.8, ISO 1600, 25 second exposure (30 images)
Of course, while you're up there in the dark, taking these multiple 40 second photos, time passes, you get colder. Random people drive past in their cars and you wonder idly what you would do if one of them stopped, and say, 4 burly guys with a chainsaw got out...
You keep thinking it was such a trek to get out here, I'm going to stick it out as long as I can. And you don't know until you got home whether you got anything that's any good or not.
One time I went to Sutton Bank, it was winter, so I could take advantage of the shorter days.
Cold, shorter days.
I stayed out too long, and the reason I called it a day was because it was getting increasingly difficult to stop my breath fogging up the lens, and I was vaguely conscious that my fingers were not working as well. On this occasion, I wasn't in the car park, but deep in the woods, where, paradoxically, I felt safer.
I looked down at my tripod, and saw this.
Ice, on a tripod leg
Time to go.
I was having to take my glasses off to look at the back of my camera and so around this point I put them down and decided I should call it a day and pack up.
Put them down.
Where?
I'd just put them down somewhere in the grass. No idea where. No matter, I thought, I'll just use the torch and get the reflection off the glass. But by this point all the grass was covered in ice too, so everything was glittering and reflecting, and I gradually realised that a) I wasn't going to be able to find my way back to the car, and b) I wouldn't be able to drive home anyway...
Oops. Obviously it wasn't just my hands that had been affected. Incredibly stupid thing to do, meaning I was going to have to ring my partner and ask if he'd drive 40 minutes, then hike into the darkness somewhere to come and get me, because I'd mislaid my glasses. Otherwise there was a pretty good chance I was going to die out here of exposure.
About 15 minutes of frantic searching later, I found them, so I'm pleased to say that the outcome of this story is I still have my glasses, and a relationship.
So ended one of my last forays to Sutton Bank. I dare say there will be more. One moonless night, the stars will call to me, and I will away.
It's still easier than street photography.