vdB14 and vdB15, Camelopardalis

Partly due to the weather, mostly due to recognising foibles and problems in my gear, it’s been ages since I made an astro image worth publishing.

vdB14 and vdB15, Camelopardalis

I shot in OSC (one-shot colour) using the QHY 268C camera, using two filters (a Neodymium light-pollution filter and IDAS NBZ dual-narrowband) for a total of over 30 hours’ data over the course of 3 nights in the past fortnight, of which I kept 20.9 hours.

Prints, cards, masks, clocks and other products featuring this image are available via my ShinyPhoto website: vdB14 + vdB15, Camelopardalis.

A full write-up detailing all the data captured and how it was processed can be seen over at my Telescopius page: vdB14 + vdB15, Camelopardalis

This one feels rather good 🙂

Around Comrie

A few years ago I discovered a pleasant gentle walk route around the Water of Ruchill outside Comrie. Almost entirely flat, it follows a loop from the village centre through scrub woodland (ideal shade on a sunny day!) along the side of the river past fields formerly occupied by a Roman fort, down to Cultybraggan PoW camp and back along the main B-road for a bit before taking a detour along a path from a standing stone over fields into the southern end of Dalginross and back along the streets to where it started.

In the town centre, the White Kirk stands out for its architecture with prominent tower and spire. Formerly the parish church, it is now home to a community centre.

Finally, a drone overview of the whole town – to the north, Dalginross, Comrie, Melville’s Monument and Glen Lednock; to the south, the Highland Boundary Fault runs from Glen Artney in the west right along the field across the road from Cultybraggan through Cowden Loch, Mill of Fortune and Newburgh Wood.

A map of the area, courtesy of the BGS Geoindex:

Sunset, Rhue by Arisaig

I wouldn’t be the only person to favour Scotland’s west coast – its beautiful landscape, impressive geology.

After a day exploring outside and around Mallaig, I stopped at Arisaig to catch the sunset and was not disappointed.

First, a couple of obvious scenes at the end of the road, the low warm light skimming lines of rock

I flew the drone a little way out over Loch nan Ceall for a more elevated perspective. The light was turning red, catching the rugged hills nearby

The view out west directly toward the setting sun was particularly impressive

The 360º panorama is one of my favourite art-forms: for best results, the optimum workflow is:

  • choose a location directly above some non-uniform structured area – not just directly above the sea but over a reef, so the panorama can stitch properly
  • think about the contrast-ratio from brightest to darkest areas of the scene; if the sun is visible, use a narrow aperture (f/10 or thereabouts) so the diffraction-spikes cling closer to the sun; choose an exposure such that the brightest part of the scene is just beginning to overexpose – typically you can recover 2/3EV highlights in post but the shadows get noisy fast and with a direct into-the-sun shot the shadow-side can easily require a 3EV shadow-lift
  • shoot RAW DNGs and ignore the JPEG
  • use RawTherapee to convert the JPEGs – apply lens distortion correction and a small amount of tonemapping, maybe even the dynamic-range-reduction module
  • use Hugin to stitch the panorama: optimize for position, barrel distortion and view but not translation; use equirectangular projection and auto-straighten; ensure the FoV is 360×180º (it may be out by 1, ie 179º); use blended+fused output for noise-reduction, unless it introduces stitching edge artifacts
  • finish, including toning and noise-reduction/sharpening, in darktable.

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Finally, just as I started the return drive, the sky provided yet more drama to see me on my way:

A selection of the above photos are available on my gallery website as prints, cards, masks and other products: Arisaig on ShinyPhoto.

Mallaig Circular and Loch an Nostarie

On a whim, I spent my August bank holiday out and about exploring a new location: on the far west coast, Mallaig is home to the ferry port connecting to Skye.

Just to the south of the town lies Loch an Nostaire – a lovely shallow loch of clear pure water and indeterminate name etymology: the current spelling is clearly anglicised, although there are no mentions of the more obvious Gaelic Nostaraidh, but rather variations include “Nosaraidh” and “Nossery” according to the 1852 Admiralty Charts. One option is for the name to date back to Old Norse naust, a ship; an alternative derivation might be via Gaelic nòsar, juicy, sappy, white. This would be cognate with nòs, cow’s milk, which sits well with one of the tributary burns being called the Allt a’ Bhainne.

The Mallaig Circular walk leads from Glasnacardoch just off the Rathad nan Eilean inland to the loch, then up between the hills Creag a’Chait and Cruach Mhalaig before descending to Mallaig.

The view down the loch, especially from higher up, is beautiful: to the east the hills of Cruach Clachach and Cruach Bhuidhe are quartzite outcrops forming a backdrop behind an unnamed island on the loch covered with native Scots Pine trees; along the opposite side of the loch runs a prominent ridge where Morar schist pelite changes to psammite.

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Chanonry Point Lighthouse

Last weekend it was ludicrously hot around home – 25ºC after lunchtime – so we drove all the way up north to the Black Isle for a stroll around Fortrose and neighbouring areas. We started with a stroll down to Chanonry Point where the lighthouse looked good in black & white.

Noctilucent Clouds 2021-06-05

Noctilucent (“night-shining”) clouds are the highest in the atmosphere, at around 76-85km altitude. They only appear in the summer months at latitudes from 50-70º (north or south), when the sun is more than 6º below the horizon. Formed in the mesosphere at very cold temperatures from ice, dust and water vapour, their gossamer threads undulate and shimmer in shades of electric blue.

There was a particularly decent display on Friday/Saturday morning – I nipped out and spent a happy hour making the video:

Timelapse: Sony a7r3, Sigma 14-24mm lens, SkyWatcher StarAdventurer tracking mount for rotation

Stills: Fuji X-T4, 16-80 f/4 lens

A selection of the images are available as prints, masks, cards and other products (even socks and jigsaw puzzles!) from my main website: ShinyPhoto: Noctilucent Clouds

Dunning Glen

One of my favoured local woodlands, just a few minutes’ drive from home, is Dunning Glen. Starting from the village, stroll up the road, round the corner and through the small doorway into the woods where trees and rivers play.

There are some steep bits, but plenty of the oak trees in particular have a gnarly character.

Herewith, some photos:

My favourite from this particular afternoon was this oak – some of its branches having rotted and fallen off:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods

The latter is available as prints, cards, masks and other products, via my main website: there is a pleasure in the pathless woods.

Around St Fillan’s

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve driven through St Fillan’s over the years, always en route to somewhere else the other end of the A85, barely stopping a handful of times to take the obvious photo the length of Loch Earn. Even the couple of craggy rocky outcrops on the way into the village were much admired from the road but I think I stopped once to shoot them for their own sake.

So last Sunday afternoon I rectified matters, slowed down and parked in the usual layby and walked back through the village, over the road, around the golf course and up St Fillan’s Chair, admiring the mountains behind a little closer.

A day of symmetry – on the way out I noticed a view up the path to a small Church of Scotland kirk was particularly appealing; on return, the view along the loch was pure calm still reflection in the water.

 

Approach to Dundurn Parish Church

Prints and things are available from my main ShinyPhoto website: Loch Earn.

Early Autumn at Glen Affric

A year without a trip to my Nice Place™ just wouldn’t be a year. It had to be done – in a moment between lockdown and further covid-19 restrictions, I nipped up to Glen Affric for a few hours.

Some intimate landscape views:

I also flew the drone around a bit. Lovely light, getting a better overview of the extent and distribution of the Caledonian Forest, river, mountains and haze into the distance.

Some years ago, I had visited the glen in the middle of winter, with temperatures a degree either side of freezing, thawing slightly as the morning progressed. I was struck by a pattern of foam flecks on the water – particularly with a fine layer of ice just millimeters below the surface, over which the foam flowed. It moved so slowly, an abstract pattern messing with my eyes trying to work out how it moved. And I was surprised, because a couple of hundred yards upstream, the river had just travelled over a couple of waterfall cascades – so where did all the energy go? With a little thought, the river changes from wide yet rapid to deep and slower, with a yet deeper central channel in a V-shape.

This time, I flew the drone over the same mouth of the river, looking straight down onto the surface. This perspective makes the patterns of the foam all the more apparent – not just a difference between the central streak flowing faster, but a semi-regular pattern in the pattern against the far bank – indicating submerged boulders.

Foam on the River Affric outflow into Loch Beinn a’Mheadhoin

Unlike previous years’ visits, where I gravitate toward early mornings, this time I had arrived late in the afternoon, with just enough time to fit in a stroll before the light faded.

The light faded.

My favourite trees looked really rather pleasant in softer light, part-silhouetted against the sunset:

Beautiful soft and gentle light – my two most-favourite trees standing on a small rise of glacial moraine, silhouetted against a grey-blue sky.

Then, in conventional fashion, night fell. I’d never been up at the Nice Place to watch that happen before, but it was magical. I stood at the famous viewpoint near the memorial, watching the clouds skimming overhead from the north as the moon rose – with Jupiter and Saturn nearby, and noticed a moon-dog aka paraselene – the first time I’ve seen such a thing, an analogue with a sun-dog during the day.

Moon-dog (paraselene), Saturn and Jupiter

Finally, with night thoroughly underway, I made a photo of the well-known view looking along the length of Loch Affric toward the mountains of Kintail in the west – the landscape bathed in moonlight, all cool blue with the barest hints of structure and even less colour in the otherwise reddy bracken.

The mountains of Kintail from Glen Affric by moonlight

Prints, masks, cards and other products based on images above and others, are available from my ShinyPhoto website: Glen Affric.

A Geek in Lockdown

I’m comparatively fortunate that the coronavirus and covid-19 have not affected me or anyone I know directly. Having spent the last 15 years working from home, life has not changed as significantly as it has for others.

So, apart from staying home and doing nothing much, what’s a geek to do to contribute back?

First, contribute data. As often as I remember, I update the KCL/Zoe app to say I’m still alive.

Second, grid computing projects.

There’s a significant amount of computer power available and machines would otherwise spend their time idle. A couple of months before the coronavirus became known, I had already installed BOINC, perhaps the oldest and best-known grid-computing system. As the scale of the Covid-19 problem became more apparent, I discovered the Rosetta@Home project which has been working to predict structure of proteins involved in the disease.

For mobile devices, there is Vodafone’s DreamLab project which similarly uses one’s iphone/ipad/tablet’s downtime to perform computations hopefully to identify drugs to fight Covid-19.

Third, art.

This took a bit of thought, but recently RedBubble who I use for selling my photography added the option of selling masks alongside the usual prints, mugs, etc.

I wasn’t at all sure what to make of it. The idea of profiting off others’ health and necessity jarred with the idea of art being a luxury item. However, a friend pointed out that if face-masks are to become normalized in society, having interesting art designs on could make them more approachable. There’s also the bit where Redbubble match each mask bought with a donation to an appropriate charity. So, a net good thing then.

Inspiration struck and I spent much of the weekend designing an image to represent the coronavirus (using a fragment of its gene sequence as a background, naturally) and even rendering a little video from it, both using Povray, my favoured ray-tracing software from the late 1990s(!). Naturally I made the scene description and other sources available as open-source: the-lurgy (on github).

The “lurgy” design and a selection of other landscape images are available on redbubble as face-masks with a profit margin set to 0.

And of course work continues, producing more photos to go on my website, ShinyPhoto

Lunan Bay

In general, lacking high pointy mountains, Angus always strikes me as one of the less dramatic parts of the country. However, I’ve visited the Lunan Bay area a few times and it makes a good escape for an afternoon.

There’s quite a nice beach…

and the ruins of Red Castle stand out stark sandstone against blue skies – ideal with high-flying cirrus cloud in the background.

It also looks quite good from the air.

And finally, I’m experimenting with a different art form – composite overlays, controlling visual information by selectively retaining structures. Essence of Lunan in one.

Composite: various aspects of an afternoon spent at Lunan Bay blended together.

Assynt, Day 2: Solus Na Madainn

For the second day of my holiday last Autumn, I got up – again! – at a ludicrously early hour and drove from Tongue round to the Assynt peninsula, to my favourite viewpoint for sunrise.

It was some drive.

All the way from Tongue to Loch Assynt without seeing another car. Bliss.

Take the A838 road (abused as part of the ghastly NC500 coastal route) via Durness at 5am in the pitch black, the wind blowing a gale, rain + windscreen wipers on full speed.

Picture avoiding a herd cows intruding across the road. Avoiding more than 10 deer.

At that surreal pre-caffeinated hour of the morning, seeing a signpost advertising “serving local seafood” makes me picture a restaurant waiter taking a scallop’s order at table.
The music of choice was Arcade Fire Mountains beyond Mountains – a song bemoaning city life with its world so small – a mental image contrasting with my surroundings, passing rural Scourie, pop 132 – the sort of place that takes longer to say the name than drive through.

And so I arrived at Rhicarn – the landscape black, clouds a grey plasma, just a little bit windy…

And the sun rose. Quite spectacularly, casting brilliant crepuscular rays from the horizon and underside edges of clouds.

Throughout the sunrise, the light was spectacular – brightly illuminating colourful clouds.

Simple abstract patterns: bright early morning sunlight illuminating clouds a warm yellow/orange.

…and casting a subtle hazy glow over the morning fog across Little Assynt, outlines of hills receding into the mist

Perhaps my favourite image from the morning has to be Suilven, the unmistakable mountain on the horizon, catching a subtle patch of oblique sunlight on a flank.

The unmistakable shape of Suilven (Sùilebheinn) catching an oblique beam of warm early morning sunlight.

Once the sun rose, I explored the Falls of Kirkaig outside Inverkirkaig. A nice long walk through lumpy landscape, to a large thundering waterfall.

Returning to above Rhicarn, clouds had flowed in obscuring the mountains on the horizon, so I experimented flying the drone to admire the surrounding landscape.

There’s something about finding a thin strip of old tarmac that obviously used to be a road – it makes a connection with the story and heritage of a location. From researching on Pastmap, it appears there was not much road here at all throughout the 19th century – presumably a cattle drovers’ track or similar. Then the old tarmac was laid, following a circuitous path around the gneiss rock hills. Finally, some time after the 1960s, a new road, now the B869, was laid through it in a boring straight line, the old route relegated to a carpark yet visible and walkable either side of the road.

I suspect at one stage this might have been nothing more than a cattle drover’s track down to the lowlands, maybe up until the early 1900s; up to 1960 the road was just a thin narrow track of tarmac with a couple of moderately sharp twisty turns in. Since then the B869 has been rerouted into a simple and less inspiring straight line and the old road relegated to a path, some of it widened to form a carpark beside the new. The bedrock is mostly Scourian gneiss, metamorphic, formed 2500-4000 million years ago (and therefore amongst the oldest rock to be found on the planet); down the centre of this view is a line of Lewisian metagabbro, gneissose, also metamorphic, formed 541-4000 million years ago. I’m not sure what the large central depression might be – it looks rather like a quarry, although there’s no evidence of anything on the maps.

Behind this scene, on the way to Clachtoll, lies some beautiful Karst landscape (cnoc’n’lochan or knock-and-lochan), formed by underground erosion of softer rock, leading to a classic pattern of rocky knolls interspersed (almost 50-50 by area) with lochs.

Further along the road lies the Maiden Loch, of which I’ve been very fond since first catching sight of it years ago. That first view was on a sunny afternoon, the sky blue reflecting in the water. I flew the drone over it, to admire the gneiss landscape all the more…

Fantastic scenery: Assynt at its very best. A very windy moment flying the drone above one of my favourite lochs, the Maiden Loch near Clachtoll. The landscape is typical knock-and-lochan Karst formation: shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, small undulating gneiss hillocks emerge amongst the lochs. In the hazy distance, Suilven cuts its familiar outline on the far horizon.

Some of the above photos are available on my photo gallery website: ShinyPhoto: Assynt

Smirisary

Can’t beat Scotland’s West Coast in summer. Saturday was spent exploring a new place to me, Smirisary in Glenuig, Lochaber.

A beach of large psammite outcrops with lyprophyre dykes

Signs of habitation – old (but possibly still in use) croft/houses just above the shore in amongst the caves

Beautiful landscapes – wide vistas via light on the sea out to the islands of Eigg and Rùm on the horizon

And on the way back home we called in at Loch Eilt by the roadside – partly to wash the salt water out of the dog, but also to admire the symmetrical reflections. The midges were out in force, pesky and biting as ever, but the photos were worth it…