Even before seeing Bodiam, when I imagined a castle, it looked just like it. It has everything, with the cool battlements and a portcullis, plus it's surrounded by a moat and when I first visited, it was just as I was becoming interested in astrophotography. So it wasn't long before I started to imagine it set beneath the stars.
I had a look and was excited to see that it lines up perfectly with Orion during the winter months, and nearly as well with the Milky Way during some of the summer months. It had been a goal of mine since then to capture it on a clear night. I had seen a few astro images taken from there before, but most were Milky Way shots and none of them had featured Orion. At the time, I was looking into buying an astro-modified DSLR (making the camera sensor more sensitive to the light emitted from certain nebulae, specifically the red colour produced from hydrogen alpha) and this plan made me go for it, hoping I could put it to good use at Bodiam.
For the next couple of years, I constantly checked the weather for a clear night, but being over an hour's drive away, it wasn't easy to just head down there. On the times I did make the journey, either the clouds rolled in, it was too foggy (it always seems to be foggy near the castle), or the moon was too bright. Those times were really frustrating, but for whatever reason I was still obsessed with checking the weather, just in case everything lined up...
The Plan
Mid January this year, the forecast showed a couple of clear nights, so I kept an eye on the forecast and checked PlanIt Pro. There would be no moon and Orion would be high enough in the sky all night, I even checked the fog and dew points, which would be good as well.
So I packed everything up, double checking I had the lens heater, as it was going to be a cold night, and set off. I parked up and as got my stuff out the car, I realised how foggy it was and thought to myself of course it's foggy, and I prepared myself for another frustrating night of no photos.
As I made my way up the path towards the castle, the fog seemed to stay in the dip down the hill and I was relieved to see a perfectly clear sky. For the image I had planned, I needed to use the star tracker to get long enough exposures to bring out the faint details of Barnard's Loop. Although the modified camera would hopefully show the reds of the nebulae better, I would still need the long exposures which the star tracker allows. To do this, I planned to take the star photos from behind the castle, and blend this with a shot of the castle from the front. This is because using the star tracker would heavily blur the castle over a two minute exposure, especially with the trees and tricky shapes in the castles battlements, making it harder to blend the two images together. Although Orion is a bit higher and out of the frame for 30mm, doing the star shots separately would also allow me to pull them down into frame a little whilst processing, so that I wouldn't need to do a tracked panorama, something I can't seem to get right with this lens.
The Shot
I set up the tripod and tracker facing Orion, already pretty high above the horizon. I didn't need a very accurate polar alignment for this shot, as the focal length was 32mm (20mm on a x1.6 crop factor camera), so it didn't take long to set the tracker up. After a few test shots, I was ready to go, setting the camera off taking 2 minute exposures, ISO 800, f2.5. For the next 45 minutes or so, I shuffled around trying to keep warm, checking the focus and that the lens heater was still working, catching the odd shooting star and trying to keep my breath from fogging up the lens.
After a while, the trees to the right were entering the frame, so I decided to move round to the front of the castle and get the foreground shots. Convincing myself the walk to the other side wasn't that far, I thought why not just pick the tripod up with everything attached and just carry it round, instead of having to take it all down and set it all back up again. Great idea... So I shouldered my bag, picked up the tripod and started moving, pretty pleased with how much time I was going to save, and about 5 steps later is where a winter's night at Bodiam Castle turned into a bit of nightmare.
My headtorch suddenly dimmed, which didn't worry me at first, as it normally does it as a warning that the batteries are starting to get low, well before they actually need changing. But a few steps later, everything went dark and it wouldn't switch back on, I assumed the cold had gotten to the batteries. I managed to slip my phone out of my pocket and get the torch on. Relieved to have the light back, I quickly got moving again. With one hand carrying the tripod, everything was a lot heavier and the freezing cold of the tripod was now making it's way through my glove. My other hand was holding my phone with no glove, as I had taken that off to get the torch on, and I was having to keep the tripod high enough so that it didn't catch on the path and send everything flying.
I picked up the pace as the bridge came into view, my hands stinging and my arm cramping, not wanting to stop due to the noises from the owls and whatever other animals I was startling with my bright phone torch in the trees above. As I got closer to the bridge, I started to feel relieved and relaxed a bit, not realising the path before the bridge had huge patches of ice. I saw the first patch too late and as my foot slipped I put everything into keeping the tripod and camera from falling. The next few minutes involved a lot of swearing and a mix between slipping on the ice, thinking the grass to the side would be better and then slipping in the mud and repeating this, whilst trying to keep the tripod off the ground, my phone torch shining everywhere but the path in front as my arm flailed around for balance.
I skidded to stop at the start of the bridge and started to catch my breath, noticing how much noise the ducks that I had woken up were making. Once I had recovered, I got the camera lined up to take the foreground shot and set off a 5 minute exposure, f8 and ISO 1600. In the time it took to take this, I also found some spare batteries for my headtorch in my bag... After finishing up the foreground shot, I packed everything up and headed back to the car, navigating the ice patches and preparing myself for the owls that still made me jump as I walked through the trees.
I struggled with the processing for this image, as the longer exposures added a lot of light pollution and gradients to the star images. I was hoping the modified camera would pick up the red in the nebulae a lot more, but only 40 minutes worth of exposure time wasn't really enough to do this without much darker skies. After a lot of re-editing and patience, I managed to bring the colours out enough to make them really stand out, which I'm really pleased with. My other issue was the corners of the star images are very obviously out of focus (even though the middle seemed to be in focus). This made it really hard to process, but by removing the stars and processing the nebulae separately (then blending these together) I think I managed to stop this from ruining the end result.
Result
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