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

Inverary: A Tale of Three Techniques

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In August I called in on an old friend in Inverary for a small guided tour around the local forests with camera in hand.

There was one particular photo I had in mind – ever since I first saw an old ruined barn with disused farm machinery, it was crying-out for the bokeh-panorama (aka Brenizer) technique – instead of one straight shot composed with the final focal-length in mind, one uses a longer lens (preferably a fast prime) and stitches the results into a panorama, to give an image with narrower DoF than was possible at the focal length in question.

Here’s the straight scene, taken on the Fuji X-H1 on the 16-50mm f/2.8 at 18mm – even wide open there’s no significant blurring in the background.

So here’s the stitched result, taken using a Helios 56mm f/2 wide open – drastic focus drop-off:

It took 100 frames at source – 2.4Gpx – but the result would be the equivalent of an 18mm lens at f/0.6. 

The second technique was keystone/perspective adjustment. On seeing a stone waterworks in the woods, my friend challenged me to get a view of it straight-on without using the drone. That’s simple enough – even though it’s several feet above head-height.

The third technique was simple long exposure: night had long fallen before I left the town but the clouds moving across Loch Fyne/Shira looked pleasantly ominous. Keeping base ISO, f/6.4 gave a 7s base exposure – with HDR 5*±2/3EV this became 7+18+30+27+10 = 92s combined total, retaining exposure from brightest point of clouds into shadowy areas in the mountainsides. (Contrast is not just a daytime problem!)

Several long exposures blended together into an HDR image of clouds and smooth water, Loch Shira from Inverary.

Twilight

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Some more tests of the Fuji X-T20 in low light conditions.

Summer has the worst daytime light for photography with harsh shadows and washed-out pale tones; however I love the night sky with its permanent twilight (at this latitude) giving cobalt blue sky with hints of the sun’s warmth just below the horizon.

Plus it’s more comfortable than winter astrophotography 😉

Three studies in cloud structure – nature’s abstract patterns and a tiny blob of light of a hamlet across Strathearn:

Continuing the anthropocene-influence theme, glorious blue, red and pale clouds in an orange-tinged sky against a tiny pylon breaking the horizon:

The Pylon

The Pylon

 

 

The Far North

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The intended road from Rosal due east was closed for road-works; I took an incredibly long detour all the way to the far north coast of Scotland – next stop the Faroes and Greenland – and stopped at Portskerra to make a couple of long exposure landscapes as the light faded to dusk.

The coastal geology was impressive – alternating areas of gneiss and sandstone with clear strata in the rock.

Portskerra at dusk – a long exposure of waves lapping around rocks on the beach looking north – next stop Greenland…

Dounreay in the distance beyond the next headland

A Day In Clouds

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That was 2017-06-20, that was. A beautiful blue sky with white fluffy wispy cirrus cloud catching the setting sun…

…followed by a noctilucent cloud display around 1am:

NLCs are the highest-flying clouds, occurring at altitudes up to 80km where the next highest type (cumulonimbus) only reaches 12km and most are lower still. Most typically they resemble a fine silver filigree of ice-cold pale blue, although more complex forms have been seen. First maybe-seen in 1885, they only really came to prominence since the 1980s, as a canary for changes in the upper atmosphere linked to climate change.

As I stood and watched the display, a patch of silver mist formed over Strathearn and made its way west along the A85 toward Crieff, so I made a little timelapse video – 17 minutes’ data compressed into 1:

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…

Late Night Mist

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Late Saturday evening, I was driving back from Argyll to Perthshire; got as far as a country lane outside Braco a few miles from home and saw this beautiful fog swirling around a copse of trees with the Ochils in the background, all in the silvery moonlight.
 
Olympus Pen-F, Pentax 50mm f/1.7, 3 frames at 8s*8 in hi-res mode.
 
Unusually for me, there’s been quite a bit of work removing extraneous distractions such as foreground telegraph poles. But the feeling is still there 🙂

Late Night Mist

Late Night Mist

Donner und Blitzen

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Wonderful amazing weather last night. The thunderstorm started around midnight, resumed sparking silently but continuously in the distance from 2 to 3am and then restarted yet again around 8-9am with jubilant thundercracks and resounding booming rumbles echoing off the clouds.

These photos were made around 2.30am – just the distant lightning illuminating the clouds.

Epic.

When it snows…

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…it does it properly. A small handful of photos taken late one evening when all around was quiet (apart from some lunatic burning-out the clutch in their Ford to get up the road) and covered in white (and slush) and no light but streetlights…

Foggy Nights

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Continuing the theme of failed attempts to do astrophotography, I spent an evening out at Newport-on-Tay in Fife. There’s a neat little road leading down to a carpark with a tiny beach and rocky outcrop… with the interplay of artificial lights and huge blanket of fog, it needed photographing 🙂

Out in the middle of nowhere

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On a whim, a friend and I spent a few hours out in the middle of nowhere, Aberdeenshire – hunting aurora which totally failed to show, avoiding fog and pointing cameras sky-wards to see what could be seen.

I quite liked the lights of a cow-byre against the mist, the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters in the constellation of Taurus and a little wisp of cloud below the rising moon.