Following a visit to Windmill farm on the Lizard peninsula towards sunset Bob Sharples and I continued with are plan to capitalise on a clear sky with some Star-trail photography using the connection of Goonhilly Earth Satellite Station dishes that follow the stars as a foreground subject,
With regards to the dishes, finding a location close enough to record reasonable sized reproduction was a bit of a challenge for 14mm wide angle lenses given the security fence restrictions and perhaps more of a problem was in the fact that the dish selected turned out to be well floodlit when darkness arrived.
The flood lighting created all sorts of exposure problems when trying to balance multiple time exposures to record delicate star lighting with a well lit foreground subject but with a bit of trial and error we finally found a balance that just about worked using the composition posted here.
I quite liked the cropped square format below that affords a larger dish in the frame that is balanced with the pole star location but overall I prefer the full frame landscape image which although the dish is smaller and the pole star rather central the full frame format does better justice to the dramatic star trail sky.
The total exposure time for this image was 33 minutes exposing 186 images at f2.8 on ISO 800 for
5 sec exposure on continuous firing and white balance set at 4000K, and a wide angle 14mm lens set to manual focus and infinity.
Perhaps some observant viewer might have noticed that it was also nice to have recorded two meteorite trails during the exposure period.
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