Last night was very clear (for a little while at least) so I decided to try and photograph something that I had been meaning to try for some time – the night sky.

Being in the northern hemisphere we don’t get the best views of the Milky Way and I knew that we were too close to Peterborough in particular to get a properly dark sky. But there are still plenty of stars and there was one spot I thought might be worth a try even if not perfect.

This is something I had been intending having a go at for a long time. My degree – from many years ago – was in Maths and Astronomy. The astronomy was something to do with the Maths rather than something I already knew a lot about but had always been interested and it seemed like a good opportunity, but I haven’t really done anything related to it since.

As this was the first time I had attempted trying to capture the sky at night this was all a bit of experimentation so was surprised to get something I was quite pleased with, though there are plenty of improvements to be made.

This was the very first attempt which was unfortunately time as a car came driving towards me from the front so the headlights blew out a large portion of the photo, but with some post processing I still quite liked the effect of this making it look like some kind of projectile impacting close by – and as a bonus still a handful of stars visible:

The next couple we just trying some different angles – of course this was making no difference to the sky itself but was more working on the foreground for some added interest:

The next photo I am sharing was another one with a car, but this time the car was approaching from behind so instead of losing a lot of the photo it actually gave a pleasant lighting to the foreground whilst leaving the night sky relatively visible – basically some very convenient if accidental light painting. I would guess looking at the light trails of the car that they were using a sat nav – the blue streak at the right hand side of the photo is where I am getting that possibility from:

One more looking the same way but deciding on a portrait shot rather than landscape – puts the tree a bit more in perspective for the scale of what we are looking at even though it still doesn’t do the difference in scale any justice:

Followed by one attempt looking virtually straight up:

Before a final photo looking in a different direction:

I was quite pleased with these as a first attempt but hope that doing a bit more research into what is needed will be able to do better in the future.

Thanks for reading, please feel free to leave any comments you wish below.