Crux and Aurora
This past weekend provided an interesting night sky opportunity with clear summer skies and a chance of spotting some aurora australis. So I headed to the Williamsdale Road vantage point on the southern side of Canberra and set up two cameras—one shooting star trails and the other doing tracked images.
The main image was shot with a Viltrox 9mm f/1.4 lens on an MSM Nomade star tracker. It is a blend of two images shot consecutively—a tracked image of the night sky and a non-tracked image of the foreground. To get a clean blend in Photoshop, I removed the trees from the tracked sky image and blended in the foreground image.
Image Data
- C: Fujifilm X-T4
- L: Viltrox 9mm f/1.4
- E: Lightroom and Photoshop
- S: MSM Nomade
View this image in my Photo Gallery, on Vero or on Flickr.
Burra Star-trail
The second image is a single-image star trail shot for about 27 minutes.
Image Data
- C: Fujifilm X-T4
- L: Viltrox 9mm f/1.4
- E: Lightroom, Photoshop and Radiant Photo
View this image in my Photo Gallery, on Vero or on Flickr.
Nightscape in the Southern Summer
There was one other photographer out there on this night. So far I have been lucky to experience this location with only one or two others. I am told that when aurora forecasts are good, dozens of cars can be lined up along the ‘Williamsdale Road Carpark’.
Summer in the southern hemisphere is a great time to shoot night skies, even though the Milky Way core is not visible from November to February. Nights are warmer, other Milky Way features, such as the Orion constellation, make for great imaging opportunities and while elusive, aurora australis can appear any time of year.
Get out and shoot!