Space Ranger

The skies are pretty dark at this location - typically bottle 2 & ~21.8 SQM reading. This amounts to an amazing number of stars being visible when clouds permit. As a consequence the minor image processing done was to brighten the foreground and darken the sky a bit😁 This was to reduce the effect of all the faint stars and thus make the hexagon more obvious.

The attached image shows the bright winter stars that form the Winter Hexagon. It was captured from a dark location in Caithness in northern Scotland on a particularly chilly night (-12 deg C), but the view of the star filled sky made it well worth braving the cold. This single long exposure was taken with a soft focus filter over the camera lens in the style of astrophotographer Akira Fuji. I like how the filter makes the brighter stars more prominent, helping the constellation shapes & star colours become more distinct. The image is a single shot captured using a static tripod, DSLR and wide angle lens (astromodded Canon 600D, 16mm FL, f3.5, ISO6400, 30s). Processing was done in Adobe Lightroom 6 & Paintshop Pro. Hope you like it :)

Thank you Richard. That was a really fabulous presentation. Also being a chemist, this has been a topic of interest to me for years. Last year I was lucky enough to take a trip to see a chemical elements exhibit in the Ulster Museum in Belfast - https://www.nmni.com/whats-on/elements-exhibition. It was fascinating, and if in the area it's well worth a visit. The person who put it all together is Dr Mike Simms - one of the people who has been researching the location of the asteroid impact site in northern Scotland 1.2 billion years ago - https://blog.geolsoc.org.uk/2019/06/10/scotlands-earth-shattering-secret-how-to-find-a-meteorite-impact-crater/. Here's a few weblinks I found of particular interest whilst reading up on the topic in the past few years. Maybe others will find them of interest too... https://www.americanscientist.org/article/a-chemical-history-of-the-universe ; http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~jaj/nucleo/index.html https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3cyRVDoePNf_rLQlwKpdeg/videos https://elements.wlonk.com/ElementsTable.htm

Outstanding image. Great work.

Thank you both. Glad you like the end result. Just in case anyone is wondering why only 29 exposures were taken it was due to clouds interfering. I would normally look to have star trails covering a 20-50 min period (not easy at times in the north of Scotland)

This image shows star trails over the largest of the two Neolithic Grey Cairns of Camster. It was produced by taking 29 exposures (Canon 760D, 30s, ISO6400, f/3.5, 16mm FL equivalent) in sequence, which were processed using StarStax to produce the star trails, with final image adjustments carried out in Adobe Lightroom 6 . This is a very dark location, so a dimmed LED light panel was located about 30m down the hillside to gently illuminate the stones of the cairn. I waited many months for the free time and right conditions to capture this image composition. I felt that the short passage of time shown by the star trails, would provide an interesting contrast with the 5000 years that had passed since these chambered cairns were originally built and used by humans. The imaging was timed so that some faint aurora above the horizon provided colourful backlighting to the scene.