Rodney Campbell's Blog

Another night in remote outback Australia, another chance to shoot under these amazingly dark skies at Bea Bea rest area.

Sunset was at 5:37PM and moonrise was going to be at 8:37PM so my window of opportunity was going to be short. No startrails again – just some static milky way action.

After dinner I headed up the hill next to our Bea Bea camp site where I’d been earlier in the afternoon. I’d arrived and was setup for shooting by 6:50PM.

Bea Bea Archway

NIKON D750 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 30 sec at f/2.8, ISO 4000 x 8 Frames

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

There was a little light pollution over the horizon so I couldn’t push the ISO too far (ISO 4000 was about the best I could hope for). The main problems I had was with the brightness of the Bea Bea campground nestled in the hollow below me and from the road trains coming through at regular intervals.

At least with the later I could time the individual shots to coincide with when they’d driven out of the scene. This just meant there was a lot of waiting around for the right moment :).

I took two sets of vertical frames to later stitch into panoramas (the first with 9 frames and the second with 8). Then I tried some single frame milky way images but anything which tried to include the campground below was nuclear. I settled on a single frame looking up at the galactic core with a couple of shooting stars.

Shooting Stars

NIKON D750 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 30 sec at f/2.8, ISO 6400

Thankful to be out under the stars again… Finished for the evening I packed up at 7:45PM and headed back down to camp.

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