FenlandPaul

That’s terrific, Paul. There’s something about light painted old machinery that works very well with the Milky Way!

Glad you got some before cloud took over. What a good idea to pause on the frames with meteors - I’d never thought of that. Particular effective at 25fps when all the meteors get lost!

Absolute belter! 🤩

A nice, bright colourful one! 👍

In the bag! Well caught. 👍

Thanks Russ. I’d hoped for a nice reflection in the water but it was very breezy so no joy - next time maybe!!

Things were very slow initially and I felt the same (especially as I’d not brought a comfy chair with me so was getting neck ache!). Glad I stuck with it - tiredness today was worth it. ☺️ Even during a big shower the hit rate is quite slim. I took around 1700 images in total from 3 cameras, and from that haul there are just 3 photogenic meteors (25 in total, most very faint).

Fantastic - look forward to seeing that!

Thankyou! That's sounds plausible given you're over in the West, but I don't pretend to be a triangulation expert! It was caught in Oxfordshire as well here, and in that image it's a little to the left of the centre line of the Milky Way. So from where you are it may well have been between Jupiter and Saturn!

I had 3 cameras whirring away last night. As is so often the case, a lot of the best meteors I saw fell just out of frame or between exposures! Of the 1700 images I waded through this morning, this stunner at 00:55 on the night of 12/13 August was my favourite, from the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens. To remove some of the noise from the sky, I stacked 32 13 second exposures, taken on a Canon 6D with Samyang 24mm lens at f/2.8 and ISO 3200. Stacked in Sequator, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. Enjoy! ✨📷

That’s a cracker! Perfectly balanced with the stone.

I've not tried that, Martin - interesting. There's also a "starglow" tool within the Astro Workflor Lightoom Presets from Alyn Wallae, with which you have full control, but I prefer the more natural look of the filter. The filter can be used for only parts of the exposure, which gives an element of control over the intensity of the effect, but it's obvioulsy not as precise as doing it in post. At some point I'll post a more detailed review showing the effect for different targets and different exposures etc.

The windmill is definitely more aesthetically pleasing than me, so here it is without my mug in the way!!

Kase Filters sell the Alyn Wallace Starglow filter, which creates a blurring effect (like high cloud can) around brighter stars. It's not to everyone's taste, but I love the dreamy appearance it can give and how it showcases the colours of stars. I've been experimenting with mine recently. Here's some shots I took using it at Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire last week. I'm interested in your thoughts on the effect! ✨📷

Oh wow, thank you very much indeed. That’s the first photography prize I’ve ever won!! 😃

I had a bit of fun at the old wind pump on Wicken Fen on Wednesday evening. It turns out that standing dead still for 20 seconds whilst being divebombed by a squadron of mosquitoes is quite challenging, but I quite like the result nonetheless! Enjoy.

A clear night and the return of dark skies allowed me to head to the wonderful Wicken Fen last night for my first nightscaping session in a couple of months. Here’s the first of my images, all of which focused on the lovely old wind pump as a foreground. Enjoy! ✨📷

Great image Paul. Very evenly lit as well, with some nice textured detail on the stonework. What did you use to light paint it with?

Superb shots with a phone! That evening was a particularly good NLC night!

It’s a shame the weather seemed to close the season down so rapidly and early. Nice to have a few decent opportunities though; they seem to get better every year.

Nice capture! Given where the Perseid radiant is at the beginning of the "season", and looking at the orientation compared to Capella and The Kids, I'd say it's likely to be a Perseid. Definitely not too early.

Fantastic job. 👌

Great image! Is it tracked? It says a 60s exposure but I can’t see any trails, which is super.

I’d spent over 25 years doing entirely visual observation, John, and loved it. I wasn’t much cop at drawing but I could describe what I saw pretty well and, despite aggressive glaucoma in one of my eyes, I’m blessed with quite keen low-light perception for faint fuzzies! Then when NEOWISE came round last year, I decided to take some (generally pretty awful!) pics with my DSLR as I’d been dabbling in some daytime timelapses. One of my images had the comet reflected in our local lake with a silhouette of me in the foreground (it even got in the local paper). And that was the moment I became hooked on landscape astrophotography. A few months later I sold my entire visual setup, which I loved, to invest in some decent lenses, tripods and a full frame camera, to give this new creative outlet a chance. I don’t regret doing that, but I do miss quiet nights at the eyepiece. At some point, when space allows, I’ll reacquire a visual setup - a 12” dob is hard to backtrack from though so it might need to be another one of those! If you’d asked me 2 years ago whether I’d turn to imaging rather than visual I’d have said a fork “no” - I lack the attention to detail and the patience. But something has really grabbed me about the night sky in a landscape setting. I think about it ALL the time - it’s become an obsession. I enjoyed visual for so long; it’s nice to be doing something new but in the medium term I don’t see them as mutually exclusive. 😊

And I suspect my final entry this season, a time lapse at 200mm of the event on 12 July over Meall a Bhuachaille, from the slopes of Cairngorm in the Scottish Highlands. IMG_0079.mp4