My wife is Irish, and in 2015 we bought a small old stone cottage a couple of miles from Baltimore in South West Cork, about as SW as you can get in Ireland. Walking back from the pub one November night, I was SHOCKED by the sheer blackness of the night sky and the dazzling array of stars. Constellations were not even recognizable, drowned out in the sea of stars. My interest in astronomy suddenly resurfaced.

Round 1 – a Horrid Mess

Fast-forward to a summer night a while later, once the cottage had been made habitable. Looking up, I was aware of a streak of pale cloud slightly spoiling the dark sky. Of course, this was the Milky Way, which I hadn’t seen for donkey’s years! Disappointment turned to awe. Out there, the Milky Way is easily visible to the naked eye even straight after leaving a bright room. I thought “I wonder if I can photograph that?”. Being a keen photographer, I reckoned I ‘knew a bit’ about photography – it turned out “you know nothing, Jon Snow”.

Nonetheless I quickly retrieved my camera, attached my fastest wide zoom lens, plonked it onto a tripod and pointed it up. Only then did I think: “Er, what settings to use?”. Obviously the widest aperture and its widest angle (24mm f/2.8) and ISO 3200 (because it seemed "about right"). I chose 30 seconds exposure, but was aware that stars might streak, as the earth rotates noticeably over even as little as a half-minute.

The result, from early August 2016, is here, my first Milky Way image, looking up SSW at around 1am.

click for bigger image

It’s a horrid mess of a picture. Yes, you can see the Milky Way, but that’s about it: out of focus, no other context, no colour, heavily streaked stars, noisy, boosted to buggery in Photoshop. Funnily enough, for a while I was quite impressed, though I didn’t really solicit opinions. If you've never photographed a night sky before, you too may be impressed, but this is really not very good.

Round 2 – 8.5/10 for Composition, 3/10 for Execution

Five months later, Christmas 2016, I had another go. It's obviously a slightly different shot, but it was taken from the same patio as above. My intention was to get the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy visible in a recognizably local setting.