Why Nightscape Photography?
You can pick almost any place, and someone has been there before. You can visit wonderous scenic locations, and there will likely be others there sharing the experience. You can trek to the most isolated hard to reach places, and there will be some evidence of humanity - if only in the track that led there. Whilst the location may be unique in its view, you are not unique in your being there - many others have gone before.
And yet...go to that location at night when the darkness has descended upon the landscape and the heaven above is covered in a billion stars that wheel and arc overhead, then you will find how different the world under night truly is. As night falls, the darkness hides the trappings of human presence and the landscape becomes new and unexplored.
Alone, into this silent world devoid of others or of memory, you feel as though you are the first, or the last, person to venture into this forgotten landscape. It is a different world and you are the only one in it, and a feeling of powerful loneliness overwhelms you. There is nothing but you, the silence disturbed only by the cool, fresh breeze, the world faded in shadows, the Milkyway above brilliant in its starry light but conveying a sense of one's insignificance compared to its unimaginable vastness. This is a world beyond the everyday one we live in, a world before man, a world that is not our own.
Into the night I have walked through many dark worlds. I have crept through a blackened forest ravaged by a long gone bushfire, where the ground was black, the trees with only bare branches reaching out to the night sky, and the sense of desolation and the "end of things" magnified by the star-filled sky. I have wondered along an empty beach, the sand glowing an ethereal light under the moon, the waves of the water like the rustling of the wind, and over my shoulder there rose the dim light of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds - galaxies beyond our own. I have wondered deep into a landscape filled with dunes, dunes like waves frozen in time and pale from the frail star light, waves of sand from horizon to horizon, and the land was empty save for myself - alone under the Milkyway and far from the existance I had left behind.
When you have seen the world under the night, a part of you will never leave - and in the light of day your heart will forever drift there, and your mind yearning for you to return.
Why Deep Sky Astrophotography?
Ever since I started taking photos through my first telescope I have been enthralled by the many wonders that exist in the universe. There is something about pointing your telescope at a distant wonder in the sky and capturing the beauty that is out there. It makes it more real than just looking at someone else's image on the internet. Often the target is so dim and so far that it cannot be seen with the naked eye, but the camera can capture the faint flow of light that has travelled many, many billions of kilometres - and then you can behold!
Such amazing beauty. Such vast mystery. The images that one can capture reveal realms that go beyond your imagination, and yet imagination is key to get a better understanding. Often I look at the images I have taken and pondered what it might be like if we lived on a planet closer to that object. Night skies filled with the faint veil of flowing nebulas drifting in the hidden winds of interstellar space, sunsets of red giant suns or hauntingly blue, galaxies with streams of stars trailing across the heavens like a hand caressing the surface of a moonlit pond. And to know, to realise, that these images are real, taken through your telescope, and that they are out there in distant universe - it is wondrous!
Astrophotography (through a telescope) is a calling that is as much technical as it is artistic. As your experience increases, so does the complexity in the techniques and equipment become. But this is not a thing to despair, for you become able to image objects that are further and dimmer - and with each step you can explore deeper and deeper into the never ending night. There is so much out there, so much more than our small, insignificant world that we often equate to our personal "universe". With a telescope you become an explorer, an explorer not of earthly landscapes but of places between the stars where the dreams of heaven are real - but forever distant.
