Hiorne star trails

I blogged briefly about this tower back in February last year. I combined a second trip to the Halnaker tree tunnel with Hiorne tower, to see if it might be suitable for some astrophotography. Whilst I loved the location, I wasn’t sure about trying a Milky Way image due to the nature of the land at the rear. It fell away alarmingly and I wondered if the galactic core (at the base of the Milky Way) would rise high enough to be seen. Eventually, I found a date and time where the Milky Way showed in a different part of the sky, meaning I could stand on fairly level ground.

However, that isn’t due for a few more months and I have been keen to try the tower as foreground interest for some star trails. When a clear night was forecast last month, we did our animals early and set out for the long drive to Arundel at sunset. We arrived two hours later, but even though I had visited before, it was hard to find the track through the centre of the park in the pitch darkness. Once on the path, it was much easier and we arrived at the base of the tower about ten minutes later.

As usual, I had a plan for the shoot, but once again, it all went to pot. My husband lit the corners of the wall with a torch, which just about enabled me to frame the tower, with the North star almost directly above. I manually focused on the building and took a few images to focus stack later if necessary, but when the time came to focus on a star, there were none bright enough to use. In fact, the only star bright enough was directly behind us, so I had to turn the tripod round to focus, turn back and repeat the performance to get everything in the frame. Of course, the images with the tower in focus were now useless because I had moved and I had to repeat them after I had taken 75 exposures for the stars. By the time we left, we had been standing around in temperatures of -3C and were both shivering uncontrollably.

The drive back home took another 1.5 hours, but at least we got to bed before midnight. It took several hours the following day to manually remove all the plane trails, but once finished, I was very pleased with the result.