Lake Brown Christmas Trip

I spent part of the Christmas holidays in Kalgoorlie, the place where I was from originally until moving to Perth many years ago. I had hoped to make an expedition to Lake Ballard which is about 1.5 hours north of Kalgoorlie, but unfortunately the weather was not accommodating. However, one must always keep an eye out for opportunities in this hobby and I planned instead to split my return journey from Kalgoorlie to Perth in half by spending a night at Lake Brown in the shire of Nungarin. The stars also aligned (pun intended) in that some members of the Perth Astrophotographers Facebook group would also be camping there when I was to stop over.

Leaving Kalgoorlie around mid-day I travelled west along the Great Eastern Highway until reaching Merridin which is located roughly half-way between Perth and Kalgoorlie. After taking on fuel I then departed north to reach Lake Brown. It was an uneventful four hour trip.

At Lake Brown I met up with three fellow astrophotographers – Debbie, Donna and Bob. They all proved great companions, and I struck up an informative conversation with Bob who is also an enthusiast with the telescope and possesses his own observatory as well. We marked the time until darkness talking about places we’ve visited and equipment we were using. After a while I went out onto the lake (which was dry) to look around for good nightscape locations and to check out how solid the surface was. A dry, solid surface meant I could take my Pajero 4wd out onto the lake someway and use it in one of my nightscape shots to provide scale and a foreground feature. Fortunately, it was quite firm – all go.

As night fell I ventured out onto the lake with Donna, carrying all our photography equipment. Donna set up her camera and tripod, she was doing a timelapse so was more “set and forget”. After that she was kind enough to keep me company as I commenced my run of panoramas.

First up was my warm up panorama image of the southern sky regions of Carina and Crux shining over the dry lake. Donna volunteered to be a feature in this shot, holding up the camera flash to the night sky. During this time I explained a few things about focusing in the night using Live View on the camera, and polar alignment of the tracking mount.

We then moved back towards the western shore so I could do my large sweeping panorama of the summer Milkyway in the eastern sky. Before doing this I drove my Pajero just off the shore and turned the interior lights on to provide some nice patterned foreground illumination on the surface of the salt lake. A test shot showed that the interior light was too bright and saturating the 30 second long exposure. Donna suggested using some tape over the lights – which worked a treat. Then for the next half hour I completed a 50 plus image panorama of the wonderful summer Milkyway over the dry salt lake. Often neglected by many nightscape astrophotographers who chase the bright Milkyway core, the dimmer outer plane of the Milkyway is as subtly beautiful as the core is dramatically brilliant. The pale plane of the outer Milkyway wanders the southern hemisphere summer night sky, its length marked by many bright red nebulas. Then there are the large sweeping structures of Barnard’s Loop that cradles the Orion constellation and the Vela Supernova remnant with its multitude of broken arcs. Difficult to image (in nightscapes), these skies are worth the effort and a good test of a nightscape photographer’s skills.

As the night grew old I prepared to pack up, but then approaching my 4wd I could faintly pick out the stars and the Carina nebula reflecting in the windscreen. Quickly I set about to take one last panorama of the car, the reflection on the windscreen and bonnet, and the southern night sky. I did manage to capture this scene, but I think the composition doesn’t convey the reflections off the car very well. Next time I’ll try to get much closer to the car so that the windscreen dominates the image field of view.

Part way through this image the wind, previously absent, starting picking up. In fact it kept getting stronger and by the time I returned to the camp on the shore the wind had blown my tent cot a few metres and Donna and I raced to catch it. When we had all turned in I laid awake and listened for quite a while as the wind howled around my closed up tent cot, the forgotten spirits of the lake now the only presence upon the lake…