To Infinity and Beyond ,,,.

One of the most awe inspiring sights I've ever seen is the night sky from a remote part of Wales. We were on a short break staying near Lake Vyrnwy. The nearest sizeable town was Bala some 12 miles away and so there is little light pollution. One cold, clear night I went outside and walked down towards the lake from the hotel  to get away from the lights. As my eyes adapted to the dark I was stunned by a perfectly dark sky blazing with stars and something I hadn't seen properly for many years... a luminous, glowing band across the sky ... The Milky Way.

That single moment had a profound effect on me and I couldn't turn my eyes away. I had never seen our galaxy in all it's magnificence like this before. Here was some celestial canvas painted with billions of stars. Somehow over the years we have lost a great treasure and never noticed as it slowly slipped away. Our cities and towns have grown ever outwards encroaching on the countryside with poorly designed street lighting which illuminates the sky as much as it does the ground depriving us of what was once taken for granted.

In that one moment I realised I was looking at something so vast it was impossible to comprehend it all.  Billions of stars so far away they merge into a nebulous glow across our skies. We live in a galaxy of at least 100 billion stars each a sun like ours, some smaller, some much larger. A huge spiral of suns and we are positioned some way out towards the rim orbiting an ordinary yellow dwarf star , our Sun.

As we look out towards the centre of our galaxy we are looking into a time machine. The light reaching our eyes from the centre left on it's journey some tens of thousands of years ago travelling towards us at 186,000 miles per second. The centre of our galaxy lies in the summer constellation of Sagittarius and here in Britain we see it low in the south on summer and autumn nights. But what we see is how it looked several tens of thousands of years ago and likewise an inhabitant of a planet orbiting one of those central suns would see earth as it was before recorded history began. You and I do not yet exist to them.

As I came back to reality I had to try and photograph what I had seen. Not an easy thing to do but with modern cameras much simpler than it used to be. I set up my camera on the balcony of our hotel room which had a good view over the lake and surrounding hills. I used two lenses a 10-20 mm wide angle and an 18 - 250 mm telephoto. I tried various exposures from 10 - 30 seconds and the aperture wide open. The iso was set between 3200 and 6400  which is very fast but can be electronically noisy. The focus was set to manual and at infinity (no surprises!). I had to use a remote device to trigger the shutter to avoid any vibration and I took several shots for each final image. These were combined in a great free piece of software called Deep Sky Stacker which smooths out any noise on individual frames and gives a much better and less noisy end result. The images below are from several visits to Lake Vyrnwy and some are taken from the dam and the southern end of the lake.

This wide angle shot was taken on Nefyn Beach, North Wales at iso 6400, 30 sec, F4.5 , 11mm and shows the southern Milky Way from Sagittarius to Cygnus and beyond

Towards the centre of our galaxy low in the southern sky. There are billions of stars here and dark lanes of dust and gas where new stars are born. We see it edge on from our position way out on one of the spiral arms. Several images were combined to produce this one image. Each was exposed for 20 seconds, iso 6400, f4.5, 11mm focal length on a Canon 550d camera.

Looking away from the centre to the northen sky the milky way is less bright as you are looking towards the outer rim of our galaxy. The constellation of Andromeda is just above the roof. To the right is the Andromeda galaxy, a small oval blur with a bright nucleus in the above image. At 2 million light years it is the most distant object visible to the naked eye and it is probably twice the size of our own galaxy.

Lake Vyrnwy on a clear night. The Milky Way is not so easily seen here in the top right of the picture as there is still a glimmer of twilight in the western sky but there are rich starfields. Jupiter is the bright object on the top left of the picture next to the prominent V shape of Taurus, and the Pleiades star cluster to the right. The double star cluster in Perseus is visible in the centre of the picture  and the Andromeda Galaxy is just above the glow from Bala, 12 miles away, on the horizon. The gothic straining tower shines brightly on the lake. The bright line in the centre is either an earth satellite or a meteor.

Sirius and Orion rising over the pine forested hills around Lake Vyrnwy