Written in the Stars: A Poundbury Night Sky Story

Poundbury sits in one of the most fortunate corners of England when it comes to the night sky. Dorset's low levels of light pollution mean that on a clear night, the stars above us are genuinely spectacular, a canopy that most city and suburban dwellers never get to see properly. All it takes is a willingness to step outside after dark and look up.

Paul Coggins, one of our dedicated CAofP volunteers, has taken that idea several steps further. Over the past months, he has been teaching himself astrophotography, and his first serious attempt has already produced this beautiful image.

 Credit: Paul Coggins

The photograph here is a star trail image, taken on Poundbury Hill Fort at the back of the new Morrish Hamlet. While Paul took the picture, his wife Rachael kept him company for several hours of stargazing while the camera did its work.

What you're actually looking at

Because the Earth rotates on its axis at around 659 miles per hour, the stars appear to move in slow circles across the night sky. Star trail photography captures that movement, not in a single hours-long exposure, which would overheat the camera and introduce digital noise, but through hundreds of shorter images taken in sequence using a device called an intervalometer. Paul's image is made up of 57 individual photographs, stacked together using free specialist software to reveal the continuous, circular paths of the stars as our planet turns beneath them.

At the centre of those circles sits Polaris, the North Star, the one fixed point around which everything else appears to rotate, because it sits almost exactly above the Earth's North Pole.

If you look carefully at the image, you might see there is a meteor streaking across the sky. Paul didn't plan that. It just happened, one of those moments that astrophotographers hope for and can never quite predict.

The whole project took around four hours of planning, execution, and processing. Paul describes it as quite challenging, but is, rightly, happy with the result.

Fancy trying it yourself?

Dorset is genuinely well placed for this kind of photography. The Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty has some of the darkest skies in southern England, and even relatively suburban spots like the Poundbury Hill Fort, as Paul has demonstrated, offer a very decent view. A sturdy tripod, a camera with manual settings, and a clear night are the basic requirements. The software Paul used to stack his images is freely available online.

We'd love to see more images like this from our community. If you've been photographing the Dorset night sky, or the Poundbury landscape, or anything else that catches your eye, please do send your photos to whatson@lovepoundbury.org. We'd like to feature reader photography regularly in the newsletter.

And a note for the new year: our Love Poundbury Through Your Lens photography competition will be returning, details to follow soon. If Paul's image has sparked your interest, start practising now!

For local attractions and natural wonders, please visit our Love Poundbury website here