Mt John Astrophotography

One of the reasons I went for my mission down to Tekapo was to visit Mt John Observatory which is New Zealand’s premier atronomical research observatory. Anyone is allowed to visit the observatory during the day, there’s even a cafe up there and the views are stunning!

 

 

 

 

But to visit at night & look at the stars through zillion dollar telescopes, you have to book in & go as part of a tour, which is organised by Earth and Sky. Apart from just going up and looking, if you have a DSLR you can also opt to do a basic Astrophotography workshop, in which a super helpful photographer by the name of Fraser Gunn walks you through the settings and setup to achieve stable photos of the stars – check his website out! As he spends a lot of time up there, he has captured some truly beautiful images! I bought a copy of a DVDROM he has released, which contains lots of very high resolution images along with timelapses in Quicktime format about twice the resolution of 1080p! Just beautiful to see… Here are a couple of his timelapses from youtube:

 

 

 

 

So myself and about a dozen tourists jumped in their bus down in Tekapo township about 8pm – it was a slightly chilly night but due to the altitude of Mt John Observatory it was going to be a lot colder up there, so we were each issued with a big jacket like people wear in Antartica. Three quarters of the way up the road to Mt John the driver stopped and explained he had to turn off his head lights, to avoid polluting the research work being done up there. It was fascinating, once we got up there & were outside for ten minutes, how your eyes adjusted to the darkness – holy dilated pupils!

Fraser took me and a couple of other people with cameras aside and mounted our cameras on to a big tripod with a horizontal bar, for multiple cameras, but he then went on to explain that the tripod is slowly rotating the bar at the same speed as the stars are rotating. If we were to use a fixed tripod we would end up with blurry star trails due to the long exposures required – most shots we took were 5 minute exposures…. So here are a few I took, using my Canon 7D with 50mm f1.4 lens… Fraser was very helpful with advice – we discussed shooting timelapse at night as well as during the day, and he was very generous with advice, especially with some ideas of how to reduce the annoying flicker that occurs shooting timelapse during the day due to variations in light and cloud cover….

If you ever find yourself in the area I highly recommend a visit to Mt John Observatory, it was a privilege to be able to spend time there. Just bear in mind it is very weather dependent – the evening I went was not crystal clear, but it was still overwhelmingly beautiful – I can only image what it must be like up there on a perfectly still night!

 

If you really want to see what these images are like, download the original 16MP shots (8MB) from my 7D here and the one below here – you can keep zooming in quite a way! On the bus back to Tekapo I was looking at my photos via the LCD display on the back of the 7D and I started zooming in… and zooming… and zooming… and I heard a Japanese tourist sitting behind me go ‘whoooooaaaaaaaaaahhhh….’ which I interpreted to mean ‘how freaking insignificant are we, sitting on this little round rock, surrounded by space….’

Mind blown!