Noctilucent Clouds 2021-06-05

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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

Aberdeenshire Coast: Catterline

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I’d never really explored much of the Aberdeenshire coastline. On Saturday, however – feeling liberated from EV range anxiety – I discovered Catterline, just south of Fowlsheugh and Dunnottar. Towards the end of a beautiful sunny day, with just enough low golden light on the landscape… I had to fly the drone a bit, too.

The coast enjoys many large rocky outcrops (all conglomerate for a few miles around):

Perhaps my favourite shot is one of the more unusual by my standards: quite a thought-out composition of receding layers of rock, with the cliffs behind casting a huge shadow mid-way up one of the rocks, with Todhead Point lighthouse in the distance – near and far, light and dark, mankind and nature all rolled into one:

Todhead Point Lighthouse from Catterline Bay

Not bad going for the little Fuji camera; having set it to f/16 for depth of field, I’m surprised it chose exposures 1/52s and 1/26s at ISO 1600 and 1/60 at ISO 1000 for its HDR bracketing, but the results are excellent, no noise problems even in the shadows.

To finish, a simple statement of peace: nothing much, just sky above, a gentle disturbance in the sea below; all is calm, all is blue:

Peace: blue sky, blue sea

Morvern 5/4: The Road Back

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And so we come to the last post in the series, a set of photos not entirely in Morvern but more on the way back up the shores of Loch Sunart and Loch Linnhe to the Corran Ferry, across and down to Loch Leven at Ballachulish.

There’s something wonderfully uplifting about rattling along these wee roads on beautiful sunny days, admiring the light.

Noctilucent Clouds (NLCs) 2017-06-15

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It’s just a week off being the longest day, and it seems never to really get dark at night around here at the moment. Still. While that precludes shooting the aurora, instead it’s noctilucent cloud (NLC) season – just started in the past couple of days so I was very pleased to capture these last night / this morning around 1am.

Apart from being a canary for global warming, NLCs are a beautiful phenomenon, glowing cold bluey-white typically filament threads lighting up the sky. Or, if you leave the camera thinking for 2 minutes they blur nicely with the more mundane clouds:

Noctilucent Clouds, around 1am – Crieff across Strathearn from Auchterarder
A total 2 minutes of exposure to see what the NLCs and ordinary clouds would get up to over that kind of timescale.

And I made a short timelapse – 6 minutes compressed into an 11-second video:

The Least Amount of Landscape

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Just to disprove the idea of deterministic landscape photography, as I was driving back from Acharn through Grandtully along Strathtay, the sky took on a most beautiful glowing cobalt-blue colour of dusk combined with the icy diamond clarity of sub-zero late autumn temperatures in the Highlands.

One of those scenes where it took a little work to convert the camera’s recordings back to something resembling what I saw: after dark fell I couldn’t make out what was in the fields beyond the car headlights; there was nothing but horizon and the glow… and one tiny fragment of wispy cloud.

It doesn’t get much more minimalist than this…

Noctilucent Clouds

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Noctilucent (“night-shining”) clouds are a rare phenomenon: the highest clouds in the atmosphere, at altitudes between 47-53 miles, consisting of tiny crystals of water ice about 100nm in diameter and requiring very cold temperatures to form. Not fully understood, they are a recently discovered meterological phenomenon with no record of their observation before 1885.

They also make a beautiful display of pale bright fibrous blue against the cobalt velvet of night…

Noctilucent Clouds Noctilucent Clouds

Two views, part of a stitched panorama.

Ailsa Craig

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One of my favourite bits of coastline is that just north of Lendalfoot on the A77 through Ayrshire, for its great geology and view over to Ailsa Craig, the home of granite used in curling stones. On a pure clear blue sunny day, who could resist it?