Wheal Prosper Sunset and Star Trail

Cornish Mine Engine Houses are an iconic feature of our local landscape and heritage and are much appreciated and photographed by locals and visitors alike.

The image above is typical of most peoples capture of an engine house and its says 'Cornwall' through and through but its worth taking a look at using the same prop after the sun has gone down.

In this single thirty second exposure above I have carefully lined up the towering chimney of Wheal Prosper to critically aline it with the insignificant pole star that looks just like a thousand other so you have to do your home work to get this one right.

In the Star-trail sequence below I have taken a series of 200 thirty second exposures to record the movement of the earths rotation over a continues period of one hour forty minutes and now you can see the effects of the critical tripod positioning in relation to the pole star which is dead centre to the axis point of the earths spin.

It might also be interesting to note that the single Sunday evening aircraft track that was recorded over just two of the exposures passed oh so close to the pole star and the towering chimney focal point.

Another point worth a mention is that what might fortunately look like a sunset afterglow in the lower part of the sky is actually light pollution fro the town of Hayle which lies to the north of Rinsey.  It is unavoidable and in this case perhaps added to the interest of the image.

As an added bonus even if it was out of frame I had a fine view of the International Space Station passing through directly overhead for several minutes.

Goonhilly Earth Satalite Station Star-trails

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.