Grahamstown star trails

I’ve been out from home to take night pictures around Grahamstown three times recently when the cloud (preferably no clouds) and wind (preferably no wind or light winds) forecasts were favourable.  The moon isn’t such a problem as you can use the moonlight to paint the foreground of your picture.  Night photos have been a dominant theme for me lately. I’ve had great results with the fantastic ‘live composition’ option on my new Olympus and I bought an expensive wide angle lens to catch as much light as possible.

The first picture’s taken looking down the Belmont Valley from the hillside below PJ Olivier School.  I had to hide the lights of Grahamstown behind the burned out tree stump and rocks but that gives a nice dramatic composition.  There was no moon but plenty of artificial light so I used a short two second exposure and took a live composition for 50 minutes. So the picture is actually 1500 images combined.

The second picture’s from just below the high point of the Oldenburgia Trail – where is goes over Dassie Krantz – south of Grahamstown.  This time the moon was full and I positioned myself so the moon, and lights of Grahamstown, were behind me – on the other side of Mountain Drive.  The camera settings are almost the same as the first picture. You can see the ribbon of car lights snaking along the N2 and the dotted lines of the two light aircraft flying along the coast.  There’s also a meteor – the thin diagonal flash in the centre-left of the picture (in the middle of the Milky Way).  The sky’s blue because there’s much less artificial light.

The last picture was taken a week later and only a few metres further down the Oldenburgia Trail.  This time I’ve pointed the camera south-east, looking down Featherstone Kloof, as the moon was just rising behind the crags to the left.  There are a lot more stars and a brighter sky because this composite is one-hour of five second exposures and the camera’s sensor picks up light from the fainter stars.  You can make out the glow of street lights from Bathurst and Port Alfred on the Indian Ocean coast 60 kilometres away.