FenlandPaul

Thanks - I will try again. Everyone raves about him so will def give the benefit of the doubt. 👍

I have to say I sent an email to cheap astrophotography a couple of weeks ago (their web form is broken, so this was the suggested alternative) and I’ve heard nothing (nor have I chased yet). But hoping that’s a blip. He has an excellent reputation.

Great field to get into! I'd highly recommend the Samyang 14mm f/2.8 as a starting point. Fully manual lens and good build quality generally. It's an EF mount, so can be used with both full frame a cropped Canon sensors. I love mine. The 24mm f/1.4 is also great and hoovers up light, but on balance I preferred my 14mm when starting out (which I'm still doing really!). Good luck with it and enjoy it!

If that was my first image of it I’d be stoked!! 👏👏

Nice shots and well worth the visit. The trails from the train are great!

It reminds me of this amazing short film by Mark Gee, one of my nightscape heroes:

Awesome, Mike. Those slabs atop Rough Tor make an excellent foreground and the air glow is just sublime (controversial, I know!). Great MW detail as well. I'm definitely envious of your MSM tracker - the Star Adventurer is a cumbersome beast for hiking around with, so the MSM has it trumped there. I LOVE the surge in nightscapes we're getting on this forum and the creativity and talent people are showing. It seems like such an accessible branch of astrophotography and the possibilities are enormous even with relatively modest equipment. A very exciting time in my opinion. 😊

Jody, that's a stunning image. Gorgeously atmospheric and interesting - I love the story it can tell with the couples in the foreground - as John, says, it's got a cinematic quality to it.

Nice images, Adam. You've got some great structure in the Milky Way - the advantage of using a tracker, although that 14mm Samyang if forgiving of some reasonably long exposures untracked.

Thanks Mike - I agree, it's a photographer's dream! I'm actually down there again at the end of October, when the moon will be rising late evening. It's after the main MW "season" but I'm hoping to get some decent shots with the Cygnus Milky Way and possibly Orion rising. I may take you up on the offer of great places to shoot! I have to say I quite like some airglow in widefield images. I think it can add a nice atmosphere to the composition, so it's never especially bothered me - the darker skies outweigh the downsides from the airglow disturbance for me. This was my zodiacal light image. It was more subtle with the naked eye, but very clear in averted vision.

That's a lovely pair of images, Mike. The flowers in the foreground of Rame Head are magical, and I love the compressed view of the core and Rho Oph. Kynance Cove is on my list of locations for next Summer's Cornwall trip - it looks like there are so many interesting compositions there.

How about a car ferry in the background?! 🤣 My main gripe is the sharpness of the structure. I focussed for the moon, but the lighthouse is slightly within the hyper focal distance so isn’t as sharp as I’d like. I think it still works because the thin cloud makes the skyscape quite dreamy, and so a slightly soft foreground kind of works. If I return to do a MW shot at some point next year (notwithstanding the light from Felixstowe docks) I’d definitely like the foreground to be sharper and would think about light painting too if the ambient light is insufficient. High tide next time too!! Really appreciate your informed feedback!

That’s very kind, Dave. I wish I could revisit and correct the things I’m not happy with - I think we all feel that with our work! But that’s all part of the learning process I suppose, and this is such a safe forum to share things on and to get constructive feedback. 😊

I've never visited Dovercourt before but I'd seen some stunning black and white long exposure images of the "outer" lighthouse standing alone in beautifully smoothed-out water. So I thought it would be fun to head over to Harwich after work on Tuesday to try to capture the Harvest moon rising behind it. The outer lighthouse is one of three decommissioned cast iron structures that worked in unison to guide ships through the deep water channel into Harwich and Flexistowe docks. The outer lighthouse sits about 200m from the beach, but the base is exposed at low tide. Fun fact: just the other side of the sea wall is the holiday park in which Hi-Di-Hi was filmed - a sitcom I was aware of but a bit too young to appreciate. The adventure was a lot more stressful than I'd anticipated. I was driving up after a day of meetings in central London with, I thought, plenty of time to spare. But road closures and tractors meant I arrived only 10 minutes before moonrise. Thankfully I'd used PhotoPills and Google StreetView to scout out how to get down to the beach and where I needed to be, but as I set up I noticed a cloud bank in the east and began to think this whole 4-hour round trip was doomed! As the clouds dispersed, a gaudy, brightly lit car ferry maneuvered itself into position exactly behind the lighthouse, utterly ruining the composition. There was nothing I could do but wait and, thankfully, with a minute to spare it moved out of frame. I'm used to landscape astrophotography being quite a relaxed pursuit; this couldn't have been further from that!! Anyway, I hope you like the final result. I didn't notice at the time but the colours from the belt of Venus were stunning - so pleased to have captured those. I used my Canon 6D and the Sigma Contemporary 150mm-600mm lens, at 300mm.

Best kind of holiday snap! Great memory.

Thank you Dave. ☺️

Yes, we love it around Sennen and West Penrith - could spend a lot longer round there! 😊 Thank you George - very kind.

I spent some of the weekend looking at some old data from our April trip to Cornwall. I found this image that I’ve not shared here before, which I think has become my favourite from that trip now I’ve managed to spend a couple of hours re-editing it. It’s the Milky Way core and Rho Ophiuchi over the old coastguard lookout on Mayon Cliff above Sennen Cove. The sky so was so incredibly dark in this direction (earlier that night I’d managed to see the zodiacal light very clearly over the sea). Shot with a Canon 6D and Samyang 24mm f/1.4 lens at f/2.8 with some light painting to illuminate the lookout and nearby rocks. Hope you enjoy! Comments and feedback always welcome. 😊

Don’t see this very often. Full cloud here but worth checking outside if you’re clear!

Sublime images. SOunds like a great adventure 👏

Happy 3,000th SGL-birthday!!

🎉🎉👏👏 and still going strong.

Record should be beaten between just before 8am this morning guys - so tune in if you can!!

Love the effect. 👌

30 years ago, I got hooked on this astronomy game after my aunt gave me The Beginner's Guide to Astronomy by Brian Jones. In that book, there were two pages that I loved - one that that showed different kinds of amateur observatory and another that gave outline plans for building your own roll off roof shed. I have been looking forward to building my own observatory ever since then! We've had the good fortune recently of being able to buy a parcel of land from a neighbour, which has, for the first time, opened up the possibility of making that 30-year dream a reality. Inspired by @Glennbloke (see his fantastic AstroBloke YouTube channel), I have decided to modify a 6' x 8' Keter Factor Apex shed like this one. Glenn's build comprised a 6' by 6' version, which has a slightly different apex design. But I have opted for a slightly larger version as otherwise the space would be "dead space" anyway, and I'd like the option to store a decent sized dob in there too. So far I've cleared the ground (doesn't look like much, but it was choc full of conifers, a large but diseased silver birch tree, and a lot of roots!) and laid a gravel base. I've also concreted in the four support posts for the roll-off-roof structure (which shouldn't need to be especially heavy-duty as the plastic roof should be reasonably light). Once the shed arrives (this evening!) I plan to think through the detail of how it will all work. Glenn's videos have a lot of useful pointers but there may be some design differences between the 6'x8' and the 6'x6' that require a different approach in some areas. I'm not the world's most competent DIYer, but I'll give things a go. One important decision I've made so far is that I will not yet be building a pier. I am banking on the floor structure being robust enough for unattended imaging and potentially visual. Ultimately if / when I upgrade to a pier, or if the structure just isn't up to it, it's a fairly simple job to disassemble the shed, lift the base and retro-build one. Simple, but probably hard work! I may be a little different to other builds here in that I don't actually know what I'm going to be putting in the observatory once it's built! 12 months ago I sold my entire visual kit to build out my photography kit for nightscapes and widefield stuff, which is where my passion lies. I have retained a little Altair Astro Starwave 70ED and have a Star Adventurer mount. I'll likely look to buy a decent imaging mount (HEQ5-Pro or EQ6R-Pro) in the new year and start my "more serious" imaging journey from there. Very much a "see how it goes" methodology. This might seem odd, but there are other garden projects that are contingent on first completing this build, so I know I'll be using it for something and I don't want to pass up on the opportunity! So this thread will simply document my build, problems and solutions etc. I suspect if you want to learn how it should be done properly, look elsewhere. But this will be my journey! In the meantime, here are a few pics of the site and the aspect, which isn't too shabby. The tree on the left would be around ESE and the house on the right is around NNW. The clouds, I hope, aren't a permanent fixture.