SEVEN PM.
TIDE FALLING.
We got on site at Truman Track about 7pm. That is not a spot you turn up to casually. The track drops you onto a small beach walled in by cliffs, and the way in is the way out. If the tide comes back before you do, you have a problem.
So the whole night ran on a clock that had nothing to do with the sky. Get in, get set, get the frames, get out.
THE TRACKER
WOULD NOT MOVE.
The Benro Polaris was set to run the panorama and it just sat there. Nothing. I am standing on a beach in the dark, watching a tide come back at me, troubleshooting a star tracker that has decided tonight is the night.
There is a version of this night where I pack up at that point and drive home with nothing. I have had those nights. This one got sorted, eventually, and the clock kept running the whole time.
THIS IS WHAT
THE CAMERA SAW.
Flat, grey, noisy, and not much to look at. Every one of the thirty two panels looked like this. The photograph does not exist yet, it is just data sitting on a card waiting for someone to do something with it.
THE CAVE
FIRST.
Foreground went first, around 10pm, shot from down on the beach so the arch would wrap the frame properly. Sixteen panels at thirty seconds each. Higher ISO than I would normally run, because the rock inside that cave swallows light and there was no time to be precious about it.
- Panels
- 16
- Shutter
- 30s
- Aperture
- f/3.5
- ISO
- 8000
THEN THE SKY,
FROM THE PLATFORM.
The sky panels were shot about an hour later from the viewing platform, roughly a hundred metres back from where the foreground was taken. Sixteen more panels, sixty seconds each, tracked so the stars stayed as points instead of smearing into lines.
Thirty two panels all up. None of them look like much on their own.
- Panels
- 16
- Shutter
- 60s
- Aperture
- f/4
- ISO
- 3200
SOMETHING
OVER THE WESTERN SKY.
While the panels were running we saw lights low in the west, tracking up towards Venus. I know what satellites look like. I have spent enough nights out here to know what a plane looks like, or a flare, or the ISS. This was none of that.
They moved in circles. Changed direction. Faded out and came back. The colour was closer to flame than anything electric. I have heard people talk about seeing this sort of thing on the Coast before and always filed it away. Seeing it yourself is different. It was unusual, and honestly a little unnerving, standing on a dark beach watching it happen.
No photo of it. The camera was busy doing something else, and by the time I thought about it, they were gone.
TRUMAN TRACK
AT NIGHT.
On site at 7pm. Frames done before midnight. A file I was happy with by 10pm the next night. Not bad for a night where the tracker did not want to play and the tide was making the decisions.
