{"id":3725,"date":"2017-02-28T18:30:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-28T17:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3725"},"modified":"2017-02-28T18:31:11","modified_gmt":"2017-02-28T17:31:11","slug":"milky-goodness-dark-sky-safari-260217","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/dark-skies\/milky-goodness-dark-sky-safari-260217","title":{"rendered":"Milky goodness; Dark Sky Safari 26\/02\/17"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nazarra had originally booked her Dark Sky Safari<\/a> for Saturday, but the weather forecast prompted a late rearrangement…and that was looking like a great idea when the weather on Saturday evening proved to be far worse than forecast \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

As I drove to Newbiggin on Sunday evening the rain was hammering against the windscreen but away to the west I could see the weather starting to clear and, by the time I collected Nazarra, Venus<\/strong><\/em> was shining bright against a dark blue background.\u00a0 Patchy cloud revealed most of the sky at various points during the evening, and the only real weather we had to contend with was a bone-chilling breeze.\u00a0 After a good look at the Orion Nebula (M42), Pleiades (M45), Andromeda galaxy (M31), Orion, Taurus, Gemini, the Plough, Cassiopeia, Auriga<\/strong><\/em> and Sirius<\/strong><\/em>, Nazarra mentioned that she hadn’t photographed the night sky but was keen to learn how to do that.\u00a0 Choosing camera settings that would be appropriate for a widefield starscape, Nazarra pressed the shutter release as I held the tripod stable against the breeze.\u00a0 That first shot looked rather orange but I couldn’t see any low cloud that would reflect light pollution…a quick change of the white balance setting did away with the orange glow and the next image had a trace of the Milky Way<\/strong><\/em> visible \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 With the cloud clearing further, the Milky Way<\/strong><\/em> came into naked eye visibility and several sections of the sky were imaged before it was time to return to Newbiggin.<\/p>\n

I’ll be leading some landscape astrophotography workshops at the fantastic Battlesteads Observatory<\/a> from March onwards, and I’m the lead astronomer there most Wednesday evenings and a couple of Saturdays every month too.\u00a0 Do get in touch if you want to learn more about the universe and how to photograph the night sky \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Here’s the Milky Way<\/strong><\/em> from the Holy Island causeway last September.<\/p>\n

\"Milky<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nazarra had originally booked her Dark Sky Safari for Saturday, but the weather forecast prompted a late rearrangement…and that was looking like a great idea when the weather on Saturday evening proved to be far worse than forecast \ud83d\ude42 As I drove to Newbiggin on Sunday evening the rain was hammering against the windscreen but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[659],"tags":[661,871,861,707,671,673,747,867,865,869,667,699,863,713,788,719,665,701],"class_list":["post-3725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dark-skies","tag-andromeda-galaxy","tag-astronomy","tag-astrophotography","tag-auriga","tag-cassiopeia","tag-cygnus","tag-gemini","tag-m31","tag-m42","tag-m45","tag-milky-way","tag-orion","tag-orion-nebula","tag-pleiades","tag-stargazing","tag-taurus","tag-the-plough","tag-venus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3725"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3733,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3725\/revisions\/3733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}