This year I’ve decided to take part in photography challenges and competitions as a way to try and improve my images.

To make a start, I’ve just submitted a photo to the astronomy photographer of the year competition. I don’t expect to win but just getting into the mindset of submitting a photo makes you think about raising the bar.

In his January WITNs video, Alyn Wallance gave viewers the challenge of taking a photo with the Orion constellation. I think I mentioned it in my previous night sky blog from a couple of weeks back? Anyway, this past weekend we had a lot of clear skies so I went out once again.

I’m still not venturing far for my astrophotography so tend to think about locations within a 15-30 minute radius. I started by going to the village of Somerton. I knew there was a flooded field there so wanted to try getting an image with star reflections in the water but the water wasn’t high enough so it didn’t come out very well (see below).

I also made a rookie mistake in the first few shots by setting the shutter to 30 seconds…on a 14mm lens…500 rule anyone? :-)

I always had my next location in mind and so after taking a few more images in the local area of Somerton, I ventured to the next village, Steeple Aston.

Steeple Aston is a village I’ve visited numerous times for night sky photography because it has a Folly in the middle of a field. There’s about a half-mile walk into what feels like the middle of nowhere but its a great location as a) it’s up high, b) there’s less light pollution than other local locations and c) it’s very private.

On arrival at the folly, and a walk through a very soggy field, I looked for compositions. I had a plan for a certain image where you could see Orion framed by one of the arches of the folly but Orion was too high in the sky so I stepped back and found a composition with it above the folly, as below.

I was really pleased with these. You can see the arches within which I wanted to capture Orion. I tried it last year but cut off the bottom of the arch so it didn’t work! With Orion where it was in the sky, my only option was to step back and get it above the folly, so that’s what I did!

Once I’d taken the images I took a while to observe the night sky. My eyes had adjusted and there was an incredible number of stars visible. It’s the clearest the skies have been since I started astrophotography, not a hint of a cloud!

I then decided to capture a few images of the Milky Way and also wanted to get an image with Andromeda in it. I haven’t properly imaged Andromeda but it ALWAYS fascinates and excites me when I capture it, it looks fantastic even though it’s tiny!

I need to do more experimenting with this new lens to figure out what ISO to use for shots like the Milky Way. As you can see I used ISO 2000 for some shots and ISO 6400 in others. I did a little experiment testing different ISO’s with Orion recently and couldn’t really tell much noticeable difference so I’ll test against the Milky Way and see what that yields.

And that was that from my night under the stars. Just over a couple of hours observing fantastic skies and continuing to try and learn about astrophotography. I’m not yet at a point where I know what my “go-to” settings are for different astro compositions with this new gear so I’ll continue to strive for that. I’m also super-excited for the Milky Way core season and hopefully getting some great images! I tried last year but it didn’t look much different to what I got above, but that was on worse equipment and more noise pollution.

The hunt goes on for better astro locations, I have a mind to use churches as a focal point for star trails in February but we’ll see what Alyn’s challenges are first :-)

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment below, it’s always nice to receive them :-)

Simon.