Tag Archives: stars

Church Bay’s Cosmic Cathedral

The Milky Way as seen from just above Church Bay, at Weaver Point, in Co. Cork. This was last night, a few minutes after the moon had set. Unfortunately, the centre of the galaxy was hidden behind a bank of clouds at the horizon. The forecast said there would be about 30% cloud, but thankfully it mostly didn’t cover most of the galaxy.

The best time to see the centre of the Milky Way again from Ireland will be in March 2026. However, you’ll still be able to shoot the less bright celestial arms once the moon has set for a good few weeks, probably.

I recommend using Sun Surveyor to plan a Milky Way shot. Photopills is good too, but the street view integration in Sun Surveyor is difficult to beat.


Apertureƒ/2.8
CameraILCE-7RM5
Focal length24mm
ISO6400
Shutter speed20s

Starry Night Sky

After photographing the National Space Centre on a dark January evening I turned around and spotted this silhouette. Luckily, there wasn’t much of a wind blowing, but we were lucky. A chill wind blew in a few minutes later.


Apertureƒ/2.8
CameraILCE-7M3
Focal length24mm
ISO640
Shutter speed30s

The Lights Have Stars

A car drove towards me a few nights ago while I was playing around with an 8 star filter on my camera. Most of the time it’s totally overdone, but I liked how this came, especially as the headlights are reflected in the bus shelter.


Apertureƒ/6.3
CameraILCE-7M3
Focal length154mm
ISO20000
Shutter speed1/160s

The Milky Way in Tenerife

The Milky Way captured from inside Teide National Park.

This is a stacked image created from 19 images of the sky and 10 “noise” images. It was assembled in Sequator using this video tutorial to help me figure out how to use it. Final adjustments in Lightroom.

Getting to Teide National Park, inside a volcano, involves a long car journey going up. We were around 2300m above sea level when I took this photo, and it takes about an hour to drive here from the coast. Driving up the whole time. Quite an experience, especially after midnight. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the lights of the resorts far below which made my stomach turn briefly, but the road was simple to follow. It just kept going up and up…

I was amazed when we got there finally. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many stars. The night sky was so dark the stars lit up brightly. Unfortunately clouds rolled in as we were taking photos but this image was the first stack I made, and the cloud hadn’t become too thick yet.

Thanks Henry for the lend of the 14mm Samyang lens. It was great having that extra wide lens!

The Milky Way and Perseid Meteors

Urban light intrudes on a long exposure shot of the night sky, but it was worth it. Got three Perseid meteors and the Milky Way.

Milky Way

Milky Way

Aperture ƒ/4
Camera ILCE-7M3
Focal length 16mm
ISO 6400
Shutter speed 30s

Us on the tower


Us on the tower

Painted with the light of a torch on a round tower in a local church yard late at night. If you look carefully you can even see stars in the sky! This page has some information about that tower:

The round tower in Waterloo (approx. 1 mile from Blarney) … … was built in the 1800’s by Fr. Matt Horgan, the then parish priest of Blarney.

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