Stars in the sky

Sorry for the unoriginal post title – I’m trying to avoid having yet another post entitled stars at night, heavenly bodies, or anything else clichéd.

In Bristol, the light pollution is pretty bad so I’ve been trying to find a decent compromise between somewhere away from street lights and somewhere that’s not a pain to get to late at night. This evening I wandered into the dark field area of Oldbury Court Estate, as it was only five minutes’ walk from my house, but significantly darker than my back garden.

These are two similar photos of the crescent moon setting behind some trees. The first is a colour image, while the second is black & white, having been taken from the green channel of the colour image (where there was least background colour from the orange and blue sky).

Then I used my fisheye lens to capture the horizon and a load of sky. It’s quite hard to find a nice compromise of exposures that includes the horizon and the stars. I think this is my favourite picture of the evening.

This one is a straightforward shot of a dark piece of sky. It’s pretty hopeless at this size, but if you click you’ll get a larger version that has more detail. You can see the constellation Orion in the lower left of the picture.

While I was editing the picture, I noted that if I ramped up the colour curve, many other stars came into view – just like when you stare into the night sky with your eyes and continuously spot new stars. I chose not to include those in this picture since it made it a lot harder to find Orion.