FenlandPaul

That’s lovely, Paul. Nice view of the terrestrial and celestial cosmos! The trailing is almost imperceptible unless you really zoom in, and even then it’s tiny - doesn’t detract from the image at all in my view. How do you find the MSM? I have a SA, but it’s a cumbersome beast and so it often gets left out of my rucksack if I’m hiking any distance. I’ve got a trip to Senja planned in a month, and need to decide whether I replace it before I go!

Nice one Jody. Having the people silhouetted in the shot brings a beautiful human, story-telling element to it. 👌

Thank you @MartinB! It’s been a challenging year for NLCs so fantastic to see so many great entries. 👍

Fantastic - glad you posted it! Lots of lovely spots down there. 👍

And finally, a compilation of two timelapse sequences from the 20 June display, from here in the Cambridgeshire Fens, one at 85mm and one at 135mm.

Beautiful images of a lovely part of the world! We’re off there ourselves in August - can’t wait. So many compositions I have in mind around that whole West Penwith area. Unfortunately our April trip was cloudy throughout.

I've been travelling to this location, the One Mile Telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory outside Cambridge, since last year trying to get an NLC shot. This year I must have visited on a dozen separate evenings. Whilst I'm yet to get the "banger" shot I'm looking for, I did finally manage to capture NLCs behind the dish on 5 July this year. A short-lived but bright display that was to the north-east after sunset.

During the 20 June display, with no-one else around it seemed the ideal time to do a selfie...

It's been a fairly challenging season for me. Work commitments make it difficult to do "both ends" of the night routinely, so I tend to go out scouting late evening. This year seems to have favoured the morning observers, and I've probably had a dozen or so failed outings with only a handful of successes. This is from the brightest and longest event I saw this year, on 20 June, and it's an 8-pane pano shot with a Canon 6D and Samyang 135mm, each pane being 2.5s at ISO800. Taken in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

Welcome to one of the most addictive strands of astronomy!! That’s an absolutely gorgeous couple of shots for your first go - really well done!! 👏👏

Super image, Paul. The really well-controlled light painting works nicely with the relatively gentle NLC display. 👌 Really slow start round here for them. I’ve been out 5 times in the last week and only one, very faint camera-only showing.

Thanks Lee, mate. I’m using a Canon 6D at the moment, to keep things simple (and cost down!), as that’s the camera I use for all my nightscape stuff. I have an Astro-modded version too. I’ve been struggling to get good stars so far, which I think might be a product of being unguided, but it’s still very early days. I suspect I’ll start guiding before I upgrade camera, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be someone who has the patience to shoot mono and combine RGB etc. But maybe a cooler one shot colour camera at some point if I can justify the outlay. Hope all’s well with you. ☺️

I prepared an update video now that I’ve been using this for a few months. Hope it helps anyone looking to build one of these!

Superb, Paul. 👍

That’s a lovely scene. 👏

Nice, Paul. I like the warmth from inside the barn in particular. 👍

Looking forward to seeing your results; unfortunately as a DSLR-only person I’m no help here whatsoever!! Good luck!

Lovely composition. 👍 I get really quite cross about the fact that so many dslrs have such dreadful intervalometers on board, if any at all!!

Plenty of Astro in that, Paul! Love the natural star glow from the high cloud. And really good work on the blending around those tree branches - amazing how you’ve got that looking so good.

Lovely image and a fun story to go with it (well, fun if it’s someone else being chased!!).

Well worth it! I really don’t understand how ICE gives different outcomes depending on weather / mood / date / what the operator has for dinner. But glad you managed to get it to work. Panos can be enormous files, especially if you’re stacking the individual frames!

Thank you, Malcolm. ☺️

That was worth waiting for, Jody - exquisite! Not a lot you can do about the Bristol light dome, but it actually balances the MW core in the image so I’d say it’s still a very successful pano. ☺️ Good idea to use an unmodded 6D for the foreground. I’ve recently acquired an unmodified version for that as well as time lapses. Getting the right white balance with the modded version really is quite challenging (if you’re me!).

The added hassle factor is definitely real, but I’ll give it a go a few times and see whether it’s materially detracting from the overall experience, which is the most important thing for me. It’s impossible to do in high winds, that’s for sure!

A few weeks ago I took a trip up to Hunstanton in NW Norfolk to take some nighttime shots. I'd had in mind to shoot over the lovely zig-zag groyne sea-defences and hopefully get Orion setting over the Wash. It was during that week when we had clear but quite hazy skies. It wasn't the best night for shooting, and Hunstanton itself has rather more light pollution that I'd like! I also decided to record my first vlog out in the field. I really enjoy watching other people out in the landscape taking nightscape shots, but there aren't that many people who seem to do it, so I thought, in my own clumsy way, I'd try to add to the videos out there! Anyway, here are my images from that night, and the vlog I recorded. I think I'll be making future videos a lot shorter - maybe less than 15 minutes - but it was fun to do (although it adds a lot of complexity to a nighttime photo shoot!). Hope you enjoy, Paul