Starship Asterisk*

This image is one of my all-time favourite images. It was captured during my recent trip to the peninsula of Mani, close to the very famous village of Vatheia. The meager amount of light pollution in this area gave me the opportunity to capture these amazing colours of the milky way. It was pretty pleasing to be able to see the milky way in such a bright way. In the technical part, this is a blended exposures image, where I used a diffuser filter to give this look to the stars and a more artistic feel to the image. I have chosen to place myself in the bottom left corner in order to be a measure of scale and to show the connection between humans and the universe.

When I arrived at this location I wasn’t alone, thankfully there was a couple, Noah and Nina, with their Shorty (the dog) and their camper van. It was nice to meet them and enjoy the night sky. I decided to capture the big view, to go with the wide-angle lens and capture the whole milky way arch and the amazing landscape. In the first place, I took a series of vertical images without using any filter in front of the lens. The result wasn’t that bad, although I wanted to use the diffuser filter, just to see the difference and if it’s any better. And then, the magic happened! The effect on the image was so so pleasing to my eyes, I couldn’t believe how much I liked this result. Unfortunately, this effect wasn’t the only one that I noticed last night; the most obvious and distracting effect was the light pollution. Especially the left part of the image is almost unusable because of the heavy lighting from the cities in the distance.

Yesterday the partial lunar eclipse was visible from Greece and was the first time that I ever captured it. My friend Konstantinos Koutsogiannis and I arrived at the port of Nafplio at 5 a.m., we set our gear and started shooting some time-lapses. I wasn’t able to set a second camera for my timelapse due to technical issues, so I changed my plans and went for a multi-exposure image, in the first place, in order to capture the phenomenon as time passes. My frame was simple, I framed the shot having the water castle of Bourtzi as a foreground and I started capturing an image every minute, just in case I missed something. Finally, I ended up using an image every three minutes in order to get this result.
In the second image, I decided to go for a tighter and more symmetrical frame emphasizing the eclipse and dawn colours.

This is June’s planet parade of five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) of our solar system and the crescent moon. Planet parade is an astronomical event that occurs when the solar system’s planets line up in a row in the same area of the night sky, as seen from Earth. In order to capture this panoramic image, I had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. because during dawn, as time passes, the sky gets brighter and brighter, and you’re unable to capture all of the planets. Although I arrived early for the event, I struggled a lot to catch Mercury because generally, it’s not that bright, and some clouds close to the horizon blocked the view. I decided to set my camera at the edge of the port of Ancient Epidaurus in order to capture the fishing boats as well. Finally, I managed to capture and include Mercury in this panel, even though it is such a faint light in the sky that you have to zoom in to spot it.

As the milky way was rising and the Cygnus and Lyra constellations appeared in the night sky, I thought that was a good chance to capture the Summer Triangle. The Summer Triangle is an astronomical asterism in the northern celestial hemisphere. The defining vertices of this imaginary triangle are Altair, Deneb, and Vega, each of which is the brightest star of its constellation (Aquila, Cygnus, and Lyra, respectively). There were some interesting rock formations in the distance, that became an excellent foreground for my frame. In order to enhance the three brighter stars of the asterism, I used a diffuser filter in front of the lens for half of the duration of the exposure. The result would have been much better and more pleasing though if I had a camera that was able to capture more colour of the Hydrogen-alpha emission nebulae. Move the slider on the image to show/hide the labels and lines of this asterism.