MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Hi, I’m Michelle Douglass, assistant
podcast producer at the National Trust. And before we start, I
wanted to flag up the slightly different format for this
episode.
In line with the UK’s current social distancing
recommendations, our presenters are currently social distancing
and weren’t able to record some of the final voiceovers.
So from time to time in this episode, you’ll hear my voice
instead of the voice of our presenter, Jo Dyson.
So now that’s out of the way. Let’s get back to this week’s
episode.
JO DYSON: You’re listening to the National Trust Podcast. I’m
Jo Dyson from the National Trust in the Southeast. In my last
episode, I experienced the majesty of a winter walk through
the Lake District.
I’m still in the Lake District. And tonight I’m braving the
chill once more to discover the wonders of the cosmos in one of
the National Trust’s dark sky areas.
After my walk earlier today, I spent a few hours resting in
this surprisingly comfortable camping pod at the Wasdale
Campsite in the Western Lake District.
Generally on a camping trip like this, night-time is for
sleeping, but apparently I’ve been missing some of the lake’s
most beautiful views, and these can be only experienced after
dark.
I was told by Lewis, the National Trust ranger, that if I
looked out of my camping pod at night, I’d see loads of stars
Looking out of the door I can't see a single star. I think it's
a little bit cloudy.
Without any stars in the sky, I’m a bit bemused as to what
Lewis is going to show me, but I’m sure whatever Lewis has
planned will be exciting.
Lewis!
LEWIS ROBERTSON: Hello.
JO DYSON: Great to meet you.
LEWIS ROBERTSON: You too.
JO DYSON: Where are the stars?!
LEWIS ROBERTSON: They may be just hidden by the clouds,
unfortunately.
JO DYSON: What would we be seeing normally?
LEWIS ROBERTSON: Well, every single star that you could
possibly see.
Wasdale has got so few houses and buildings within it. There’s
just so little light that comes off of it.
You can see the stars an awful lot better when the skies are
clear.
JO DYSON: Do you need to come somewhere quite as remote as
Wasdale to see stars?
LEWIS ROBERTSON: Generally, the more rural you can go, the
better, but you don’t necessarily have to go to some
place quite as remote as Wasdale to get a good view of the night
sky.
All you really need is to be just away from lights as much as
you can be in and then just look up.
I did have a surprise set up for you.
I have an astrophotographer who’s going to show us how to
take pictures of the night sky and unfortunately there’s not
much night sky, but I’m sure he’ll still be able to teach us
a thing or two about taking photographs at night.
So if we take a walk down to the car park, we’re going to see
what he can teach us.
JO DYSON: Earlier on today, we were driving down this road on
our way to Wasdale head campsite, and obviously we could
see all of Wast Water to our right, all the peaks in the
distance.
This is quite strange now to think that all we can see is
this kind of metre radius with the light that’s being given off
from our head torch.
LEWIS ROBERTSON: It gives you a completely different perspective
of the same place that you’ve enjoyed in the daytime.
JO DYSON: Lewis, what first got you interested in photographing
the night sky?
LEWIS ROBERTSON: I first got interested when I was taking on
holidays as a kid up to the Northwest of Scotland with my
parents.
When you go further North, generally your view of the night
sky gets a little bit better just because there’s less light
pollution as you go further North, but you can also get a
really good view of the aurora borealis sometimes.
JO DYSON: The aurora borealis is the northern lights?
LEWIS ROBERTSON: The first time I saw that, it’s just, you’re
hooked.
I’ve only seen it from Northern Scotland, so it’s maybe not as
spectacular as perhaps Iceland, but you can still see the sort
of towers and spires that you see on those fancy images, but
they’re maybe just a little bit duller.
So we’re just coming up to one of the car parks now. It’s a
really good place to stop and have a look at the stars.
There’s a nice little beach where you can get just onto the
edge of Wast Water itself and get a really good view of the
night sky.
Steven’s actually down by the lake waiting for us.
JO DYSON: Great.
Hi, you must be Steven?
STEVEN HANNA: Yes. Hi, how are you?
Nice to meet you.
JO DYSON: I’m Jo. Nice to meet you.
Not the stars that we were expecting this evening!
STEVEN HANNA: No!
JO DYSON: So what can we photograph?
STEVEN HANNA: We’re going to shoot the actual lake itself,
and hopefully get some nice moody images of the clouds
rolling over the top of the fells in the distance.
JO DYSON: Will we be using a flash to get this kind of
photography?
STEVEN HANNA: No, we’re not going to use any flash.
JO DYSON: No flash?
STEVEN HANNA: No. No kind of lighting at all. Just going to
let the camera do its magic. The camera can pick up loads of
detail which the naked eye can’t. So hopefully once we
start to do a few long exposures, you should be able to
see the rocks in the foreground and the lake and then the
mountains in the distance.
JO DYSON: So Steven, could you talk me through the kit that
we’ve got here?
STEVEN HANNA: What we’re shooting on is a Sony mirrorless
camera, and we’re going to be shooting with a really wide
angle lens, because ideally we’d want to be filling as much of
the sky as possible with stars.
Obviously got a tripod. So we’re going to make sure everything’s
really secure.
When it comes to astrophotography, what you
really want to be using is what they call a fast lens. So that
means a lens that can go down to something like f/2.8 or f/3.5.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: F-stops are one of the three camera settings
you’ll need to understand to master night-time photography.
F-stops allow you to control how light can pass through the lens
and onto the camera sensor.
So we set our cameras to an F-stop of 2.8, but some cameras
go as low as f/1.4.
Now while these lenses allow you to get brighter pictures in dark
surroundings, there is a trade-off. Using a low F-stop
setting can make it difficult to focus your lens.
STEVEN HANNA: So maybe we should start with trying to get some
focus first of all.
JO DYSON: Yeah.
STEVEN HANNA: So what we’re looking for when we’re doing
that is we’re looking for what’s called infinity focus.
What you’ll find is a lot of lenses will have a mark on it
which shows where infinity focus is meant to be. Now that is only
a guide. It’s normally most lenses are not a hundred percent
accurate.
So a good starting point is to put it to infinity, and then
using the stars. So you would zoom in on the live view in the
camera. Put the star in the very, very centre of the frame,
and you would zoom in.
Because obviously we don’t have stars in the sky, we’re actually
going to use the lights of the building away across the other
side of the lake.
Just rotate the manual focus ring on the lens until we can
get the lights or the stars to be as small and as pinpoint as
possible.
Now, the drawback of that is obviously if we’re shooting
stars or we’re shooting the fells in the distance here, they
would be in focus, because they’re so far away. But we have
to be careful if we have anything in the foreground
that’s really close to the camera lens, there’s a chance
that it’s going to be slightly soft.
JO DYSON: Okay.
STEVEN HANNA: So I tend to keep the tripod up quite high and not
have anything in the immediate foreground-
Just to make sure that we keep everything nice and sharp.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: The next setting you’ll need to get to
grips with is ISO. This allows you to adjust the sensitivity of
your camera sensor. And this time, the higher the setting,
the brighter the image.
The trade-off with this setting is that higher ISOs can result
in grainier images.
The third and final parameter you’ll need to set is the
shutter speed.
This lets you control the amount of time the sensor is exposed to
light. This is measured in seconds and the longer the
exposure time, the brighter the image.
But again, this setting must be handled with care. Set your
shutter speed for too long and your image may have some
unwanted characteristics.
STEVEN HANNA: Ideally for stars, we’ll be shooting maybe in
around about like 20 to 30 seconds. Any more than that and
you’re going to start to get those little star trails in the
sky that–
JO DYSON: So it would look like a shooting star?
STEVEN HANNA: It would, yes. There’s a mathematical way of
actually working it out, and it’s called the 500 rule.
JO DYSON: Okay.
STEVEN HANNA: So basically you take 500 and you divide it by
the focal length of your lens.
This here is an 18mm wide angle lens, so it works out anywhere
between 20 and 30 seconds.
Normally what happens is cameras will go up to 30 seconds that
you can just manually adjust yourself. And then if you want
to go longer than 30 seconds, so what you’ll have to do is put
your camera into what’s called bulb mode.
JO DYSON: Bulb mode?
STEVEN HANNA: So you have to have some sort of a self timer
or a cable release. I think because we don’t have any stars,
we’re not worry too much about limiting our exposure time. So I
think what we’ll do is go for a minute.
JO DYSON: Shall we give it a go?
STEVEN HANNA: Yes, let’s do it.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: The three camera settings work in unison
and adjusting one may change the others and affect your image.
It’s a delicate balance of trial and error which can take a while
to get right, but when you do it can produce some spectacular
images.
JO DYSON: Oh!
STEVEN HANNA: So you can see the way it’s actually picked up.
JO DYSON: Gosh, you can really see all the mountains in the
background.
STEVEN HANNA: So you can see some of the low clouds just kind
of rolling over the fells and then some of the rocks.
JO DYSON: Gosh, it’s quite incredible what it’s picked up
when all we can see with the naked eye is pitch black.
STEVEN HANNA: Yeah, probably at the minute I’d say it actually
looks maybe a little bit dark, so we would probably have to
either put the ISO up even further, which is going to make
it-
JO DYSON: More grainy.
STEVEN HANNA: Exactly, yeah. Or else we’ll start to adjust our
shutter speed.
So if we were to go into maybe a two minute or a four minute long
exposure, hopefully we should see a little bit more detail.
JO DYSON: How did you get into astrophotography?
STEVEN HANNA: One of the first things was Tim Peake, the
British astronaut.
On Twitter and Instagram he started posting images that he
was taking whenever he went up in the space station.
That just really piqued up my interest of what was actually
capable. And then a guy back in Northern Ireland was running an
astrophotography workshop.
We went up to Mussenden Temple, which is one of the National
Trust properties back in Northern Ireland, and we had
clear skies the whole night and just being able to photograph
the Milky Way and the detail the camera was picking up. It just-
it just blew my mind.
That was two minutes, almost two minutes we did that for. So if I
show you the difference.
JO DYSON: It’s huge, isn’t it? The mountains almost like it’s
just shot in the day.
STEVEN HANNA: It’s amazing the detail that the long exposure
can pick up. And you’ve also got that little reflection coming
across the lake from the house that the other side, the lights.
JO DYSON: Yeah. And you can see all the clouds in the sky with
the different mountains. Yeah. It just really looks like a sort
of overcast day shot really, doesn’t it?
STEVEN HANNA: We have another camera set up, and I’ve just
messed up all the settings for you. Do you want to have a go at
setting that up?
JO DYSON: Yes, can I?
Okay, first up. That F-stop is now saying f/8. So I’d like to
set that to f/2.8.
STEVEN HANNA: That’s right. The 2.8 is going to let in much more
light.
JO DYSON: I need to make that ISO number much higher. So at
the moment, that’s saying 2000. We had it on 12,800.
STEVEN HANNA: We had. Yeah.
Because it is so dark here.
JO DYSON: That shutter speed is only showing 13 seconds.
STEVEN HANNA: Our last thing is –
JO DYSON: Infinity!
STEVEN HANNA: Yes, it's focusing.
What are we looking for then whenever we’re trying to get our
stars into focus?
JO DYSON: The brightest point?
STEVEN HANNA: Yeah.
Well done. Good to go.
JO DYSON: How do you compose a shot if you’re an
astrophotographer?
STEVEN HANNA: If you’re shooting somewhere where there’s maybe
not as nice scenery around, you probably maybe want to include
much more of the sky, and almost fill the sky with stars.
The likes of here at Wast Water, you’ve just got the beautiful
lake and the fells, you would want to include that in the
image.
JO DYSON: Yeah.
STEVEN HANNA: Though if you’re in a really beautiful area, you
may as well try and incorporate it, so you’re almost shooting a
landscape, but just with the night sky.
JO DYSON: So I’m ready to shoot.
STEVEN HANNA: Ready to go, yeah?
JO DYSON: Yeah. Okay. I’ll just take the picture.
Great. Steven, these photographs are amazing. Look at these
beautiful images, Steven. It’s making me think, what would we
see if it wasn’t such a cloudy evening?
STEVEN HANNA: Okay, well there’s a few different apps we can use.
And this is one called Sky Guide, which I would use quite a
bit to actually let you see what is in the sky. We load it up–
JO DYSON: So you’re pointing it at the sky?
STEVEN HANNA: Yeah. And if you just move around-
JO DYSON: Oh yeah. We’re literally just turning around,
pointing the phone up at the sky and it’s showing us in real-time
what stars would be behind those clouds.
Leo.
STEVEN HANNA: Here’s part of the Milky Way, just over here and
you can see Sirius.
JO DYSON: Oh yeah.
STEVEN HANNA: There’s the constellation of Orion. You can
easily recognise that with the three stars that seem to be in a
line.
JO DYSON: Yes. Is that Orion’s Belt?
STEVEN HANNA: Yeah. Then if we keep going right, there’s the
Andromeda Galaxy.
This section of the Milky Way is called Deneb. It’s actually the
shape of a cross. And then the middle of it, if you can see
there, there’s a Nebula. It’s actually in the shape of North
America. And it’s called the North American Nebula.
So you can see how it’s pink and purple. What you can find is if
you’re doing the longer exposures, whenever you have
stars, it’ll bring out some of these lovely colours.
Now obviously our naked eyes can’t see, but the longer
exposures in the camera can see.
And then that is Polaris over here.
JO DYSON: The North Star.
STEVEN HANNA: We’ve had rain, we’ve had wind, we’ve had a lot
of cloud, we’ve had no stars.
JO DYSON: Yeah.
STEVEN HANNA: There’s this one other thing we can do, which is
quite a lot of fun. So we’re going to do a little bit of
light painting. So we’re going to still use our long exposure,
probably about 30 seconds.
But if you and Lewis want to get your torches, we’re going to
actually move them about. And what that’ll do is that’ll
create some lovely trails of the movement. So whatever shapes you
make, the long exposure is going to capture those.
JO DYSON: So Lewis, I’ve got my white torch light. You’ve got
your red torch light.
LEWIS ROBERTSON: Yep!
JO DYSON: I reckon we give it a go to make our own stars.
LEWIS ROBERTSON: In the absence of some real ones. Let’s make
our own.
JO DYSON: Okay, right.
STEVEN HANNA: Okay, so three, two, one, go!
JO DYSON: I don’t know if I did the star shape.
STEVEN HANNA: Oh yeah!
LEWIS ROBERTSON: That sounds promising.
STEVEN HANNA: Hey, that’ll do!
JO DYSON: Yours is a good star!
STEVEN HANNA: A pretty good effort I think!
JO DYSON: We’ve created our own stars in the absence of real
ones. That’s fun! Cool!
Steven, that’s been so interesting. I didn’t know you
could capture some things when it’s so dark.
STEVEN HANNA: Yeah. It’s quite amazing that our naked eye sees
just black and yet the camera can just make it look almost
like daylight.
JO DYSON: Thank you. That’s been really, really good.
STEVEN HANNA: You’re very welcome. You got your stars at
the very end!
JO DYSON: Exactly, yeah!
Now my previous holidays to the lakes have always been in much
warmer months, so yeah, my first visit in the winter, which I
wouldn’t have thought to do previously, although it’s cold
and I’ve got about 20 layers on, it really does create quite a
magical feeling, because it’s so much quieter, you really do beat
the crowds and you enjoy this landscape in a much more
private, peaceful way.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the National Trust
podcast. Until next time from me, Jo Dyson. Goodbye.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: This episode was recorded before the
government COVID-19 travel restrictions came into place,
and since then we’ve sadly taken the decision to close all our
gated parks and gardens in addition to our houses, shops,
and cafés to help restrict the spread of coronavirus.
For now, we’d encourage you not to explore our places in person
and instead explore our back catalogue of over 70 podcast
episodes from the comfort of your own home.
To find more audio from the National Trust, go to
nationaltrust.org.uk/podcasts. And to stay up to date in our
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