Colourful ones at that. The thought of sitting out in the dark, like really dark, like no moon dark and tripping over crabs kinda dark.. in spots away from people is not always on the top of my list of things to do – except for the away from people thing 🙂 however it is growing on me, maybe this year I will make more of an effort to get out and capture more the great night sky we have in this part of the world.

The weather was great, pleasantly warm and no clouds and great for the beach or pumping yabbies down the river, yep my arms are still sore :). But all this cloud free weather is not so great for colourful sunsets or sunrise however at the right time of the month, which it was, the moon is a late riser and its a perfect time to get out and see the stars. Chinamans beach is the north most accessible beach from the bombing range which extends for 20 kms or so before you reach Yamba and Iluka, This means looking south guarantees very little light pollution apart from the odd fishing trawler out to sea or the occasional fa/18 sortie on some training session 😉 the latter is pretty hard to miss and luckily fairly rare 🙂 I do also find it interesting that the whole range is located in the area called Bundjalung National Park but you cant get into most of it 🙂

Onto the stars, its amazing to see how much the colour the stars have and star trails are a great way to bring this out, by slightly underexposing the sky and stars means you retain the colour, in this case only the brightest star was over exposed, ie blinking on the highlights display.

This set of trail images is made up of about 30 images each with a shutter speed of 86 seconds @f2.8 (14mm) and ISO 400 with a separate single image for the foreground. The foreground image is only 30 seconds and was lit using a LED torch. The trail images are merged via layers in Photoshop by simply using 'lighten' as the blend mode.

I would have gone for a few hours more, but the promise of 6am wake up call from tickles and wallaby that besides scaring the shit outta me was taking way too much interest in me whilst munching the grass nearby.