Three Castle head is one of my favourite locations in Ireland to shoot from. With the Lake, the Castle, the Cliffs and the Ocean, there is stunning beauty in all directions. Each time I have been there I had the place to myself, and its in a very dark location.
This was going to be another Milky Way Arc shot with the 50mm lens to get detail in the sky. I took 3 rows of panels with 9 frames per row for the sky, An hour after darkness ended, I stayed in the same position to take 2 rows of 9 frames per row for the foreground. The sky shows the rising Milky Way in the South East, which stretches all across the sky to the North. I knew before I arrived at the spot, where I was going to set up, allowing me to shoot the Castle and Lake in the center of the frame with the Arc overhead. The dusty view of the Sky is the view through all the millions of stars that lie in the plane of our Milky Way, and the dark areas, are gas clouds that block out the light behind them. It took 90mins to shot the sky, as each of the 27 frames has 2mins of Exposure at 1000ISO at F2. I used a star tracker to follow the stars for each 2min exposure so that there was no blurring in each shot. The foreground took another 30mins to shoot. In total this panoramic mosaic has 45 frames with over 100mins of exposure in the full picture. In this image, I captured Air Glow banding for the first time in one of my images. The Green and brown ripples that can be seen in the right hand side of the image. This is due to reactions from the solar winds high in the atmosphere, and its another indication of a dark site, as the Air Glow is very dim and wont be seen in light polluted areas.
UPDATE: This print is available to purchase now on my site here.
