Lions Gateway

The west coast had a disappointment last weekend when a strong aurora forecast that gave those on the east coast a great display, but faded away to... more

by Alexis Birkill

Title

Lions Gateway

Artist

Alexis Birkill

Medium

Photograph

Description

The west coast had a disappointment last weekend when a strong aurora forecast that gave those on the east coast a great display, but faded away to nothing just as darkness arrived over here.

However, there have been other opportunities for night sky photography. This is a shot that I've been meaning to try out for a while, to see how strongly I can pick up star trails in a city location with the right techniques and conditions, and I finally got around to a couple of weeks ago.

While there's lots of possible places to try this out, this location, on the far side of Stanley Park looking north towards the Lions Gate Bridge, has always struck me as being one that could work well. With a northerly view, it's possible to capture Polaris in the photograph, which is almost perfectly aligned with the north celestial pole. This means that this star appears to stay stationary, while the others appear to rotate around it.

I knew I needed two things to make this shot work, exceptionally clear skies, and a rising moon. Any cloud or even haze in the sky would pick up the bright city lights (downtown Vancouver is only about 3km behind me from here), making it very difficult to capture all but the brightest stars. The rising moon, which would be behind me, would help light up the trees in Stanley Park and prevent them from being completely in silhouette. Finally I got the right conditions and went out to give it a go.

The one thing I hadn't considered was the tide, as I wanted to shoot this from very low down to get the reflections of the bridge in the water. The location was also trickier than I'd hoped, as I also wanted to get both of the bridge towers in, preventing me from going further to the left as the trees would start to block one. The tide was low, but not as low as I would have liked, leaving me a very thin piece of dry(ish) land to set up on. As the tide was coming in, I knew I'd only have about an hour and a half of shooting before the water level got too high again, so I didn't hang around!

Uploaded

September 18th, 2014