Eye on the Sky
Spectacular moments looking up
It has been a while since I made an entry in My Photo Journal. It’s not that I haven’t been taking pictures, I have. It’s just that I’ve been slow to update this blog. Looking back at the last few months, I see there were quite a few images taken while I was looking up at the sky and beyond. It’s something I do often. Perhaps it’s a side effect of being far sighted, of wanting to look off into the distance as far as I can.
The Dark Side of the Moon
August 21, 2025
It is hard to find the moon less illuminated than this. And yet there is something magical about imagining the part you can’t see. Of seeing the whole of the moon when only a sliver is showing. We know it is there. We just can’t see it. Or can we?
The Day Has Begun
August 23, 2025
The moment the sun cracks the horizon, it is hard to argue that the day has not begun. I can still hear Ruth recounting the story of her and friend Sarah sleeping at the Young’s farmhouse just north of here when they were teenagers, and Sarah’s Dad yelling at them, “Get up you lazy heads. The day’s half over!” It was her connection with that farmhouse and those people that brought us to this patch of land almost 40 years ago.
The Corn Moon
September 27, 2025
After a while, full moons can seem a dime a dozen, but changing the perspective, perhaps the foreground, can change everything. This is the first of three full moons I will present in this journal entry.
When Moonlight Overtakes the Night
September 9, 2025
Even the stars bow out when the moon overtakes the night. Photographing stars and other celestial delights, would have to wait for darker skies.
Aurora Borealis - The Northern Lights
September 29 - October 1, 2025
Everything we have we owe to the Sun. Without it, we would be nothing. We wouldn’t exist. There would be no food, no plants, no animals, no us. Even a full moon is nothing without sunlight. The Sun is everything and this year, the sun has been very active. It is a cycle it goes through and when the sun becomes this active, earthlings, at least those who carry cameras and look for auroras, get very excited. With reports of giant solar flares hurtling charged particles towards earth, many photographers like myself, at least in the Northern Hemisphere have been on the lookout for Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights as those particles interact with Earth’s magnetic fields.
There has been plenty to watch out for of late. On September 30th, acting on one such tip, I managed to shoot an unusual image of the northern lights from my side yard with a new action camera I began experimenting with this summer called an Insta360 X5. I had been intrigued by the camera after seeing results from it posted on the the Ontario Aurora Chasers Facebook group earlier in the year. Particularly impressive were the star trails combined with northern lights in one entry. These moving trails of light within the image represent the movement of the stars during the many exposures that are taken to create a short movie. This is just a single frame of that movie.
This tiny planet view taken in the early morning hours of September 30th, shows a 360 degree view around my side yard, the dark centre being the blackness of the immediate surroundings of the camera mounted on a tripod for the duration of approximately 150 timelapse images. The lighter area surrounding the tiny black planet is the sky, complete with stars moving high above and Lady Aurora rising in the north at the top of the image. Light pollution from the Bay of Quinte on the right and the Greater Toronto Area on the lower left illuminate the horizon, with trees at the edge of our mowed area extending up into the nearby sky. A single light near the back of my house at the 9 o’clock position reveals the location of the back of my house.
And here is the final video I made with the camera and a little help from iMovie to add a title and a bit of royalty free music. At some point in the future I hope to add my own audio sounds, but this will suffice for my first attempt.
Below is a different view of the same scene, in fact the same recording. I have just flattened the 360 degree sphere to present a flat field ultra wide view.
There are many effects that can be achieved in post processing after the video camera stores its series of 360 degree frames. The ultrawide view above is taken from the same series as the tiny planet view above, but with different settings. No longer wrapped in a sphere, the house is more clearly visible and the perspective is normalized to what we might expect to see if we were standing by the camera looking around with the southern view at the edges and the northern view in the centre. Note the milky way arching high above, extending across the sky from northwest to south east. The aurora borealis are much more discernible in this image having not been shrunk by the spherical presentation in the tiny planet shot. It was a spectacular display with pulsating bands of coloured lights visible off in the distance.
With the sun being so active this year, I’ve taken to watching Facebook aurora groups to see when people are getting shots of the spectacle. When they do, I mobilize as quickly as I can to take advantage either by heading to the darkness of my side yard or hoping into the car to find a different perspective. The night after the previous shots, the sky was still active and I was determined to take advantage of it and get a shot of the aurora reflected in a body of water, a shot that I’ve seen many times before but never managed myself.
I’d been thinking about possible locations for the shot and thought of the town of Bewdley on Rice Lake, but it was already getting late, and that’s a bit of a drive from where I live. So following my instinct, but without actually knowing where I was going, I turned right at the bottom of my driveway away from the Rice Lake route and headed instead towards the Trent River. Within minutes I had arrived at the Hagues Reach Dam at the south end of Campbellford. It’s a quiet stretch of water above the dam with a clear view to the north which was exactly what I was looking for.
I have photographed there before during the day as you can see in this post from last spring when the gates were open and the water was flowing fast and furious. Things are much quieter there in the fall, but the sound of water rushing below me still was quite ominous in the pitch black. Fortunately I had come with a head torch to light my way.
I wasn’t sure if my shot would work, as the view looks directly at Campbellford and the street lights of Haven on Trent, a new residential development, leading to the dark site are very bright with the lights of the Campbellford industrial park just beyond casting a quantity of unshielded light, but unlit Ferris Provincial Park on the right would surely cloak at least part of the image in darkness and for better or worse I had made my choice and would now have to make the best of it.
While I was scrutinized by a local in a pickup truck who pulled up to the dam to see what I was doing there after midnight, I must have passed his test as he pulled away after seeing me carry cameras and tripods from my car on to the darkened platform of the dam. I was quite happy with the result considering the display was not nearly as impressive as the night before.
End of Season in Cottage Country
October 2, 2025
Occasionally, a photo presents itself that is so obvious, all I need to do is raise my camera and shoot. Such was the case as I was returning home from a friends place just after sunset. I was crossing the bridge over the Trent River at Lake Seymour when I saw the composition. Reaching the other side, I turned back to the north side of the bridge and parking safely off the road. I walked to the point of view that had caught my eye and fired off a single shot. Cottages outfitted with docks line both shorelines, the occupants squeezing one more weekend of warmish weather out of the final vestiges of summer. I could hear their voices and sense the magic of the moment. I knew the weather could not hold for much longer and felt a strong connection to those people who spend their weekends in cottage country. I simply metered on the sky and let the shadows and its occupants fall away into darkness.
Cobourg Beach
October 3, 2025
The next day, I was visiting a friend in Cobourg. The sun was blazingly bright. We walked along the beach catching up on news, watching the birds gathered on the shoreline and following a sailboat drifting along offshore. The sun was pleasantly warm for the time of year and the sand hot to the touch. The predominantly blue scene did not match the lightness of my mood, so I switched to black and white with a red filter to draw out the details in the clouds. Loving how the sunlight was refracting through my Viltrox 13mm 1.4 lens, I made the sun itself a main component of the composition. The sailboat appeared as a tiny but not insignificant speck in the wide angle view. There seemed just enough going on in the composition to hold one’s attention.
The Whole of the Moon
October 6, 2025
A friend asked me if I would try to catch a picture of the Harvest Moon several days before the event arrived. I replied I wasn’t sure as it would occur on the eve of the anniversary of my wife’s passing and I had no idea how I might be feeling. Primed by her question however, I ventured out and was ready to give it my full attention. The Harvest Moon, the first of three consecutive super moons due to its proximity to Earth, did not disappoint.
I even made a second picture. The Harvest Moon is so called as it provides additional light to farmers as they bring in their fall crops. I tried to show this relationship by placing some wild grasses in front of the giant orb in the sky. It is hard to accept that a year has past without my wife but this fact is unavoidable now. Time waits for no man and I see it as my task to make the most of whatever this life has left to offer me. It is a privilege to see such things and I hope to never take them for granted.
Searching for Comet Lemmon
October 3 - 20, 2025
In early October, I began searching for Comet Lemmon which was beginning to get rave reviews on social media. I knew it was supposed to appear kow on the horizon beneath the Big Dipper about an hour after sunset. Try as I might however, I kept forgetting to look before it had already slipped out of sight. The search wasn’t without its rewards however and on one outing I captured this scene of the constellation during my feeble attempts to catch a look of the elusive comet.
The clouds in the picture above are lit by the setting sun off to the left. The comet was already out of sight below the horizon, but it’s a pretty scene all the same and one of the first I have made of the Big Dipper. Although I had not spotted the comet, at least I had found a patch of grass on my property with a clear view to the north from which I had a reasonable chance of photographing it if I could just get my act together and get out there in time.
Of course finding the point of view was only half the battle. It seemed like all sorts of events both weather and personal came into play to frustrate my search, but patience eventually paid off and on Oct 20, my stars finally aligned.
Shooting with my 35mm F2 lens set wide open at ISO 3200, I made an exposure of 5 seconds. Actually, I bracketed all over the place to get the best possible exposure, using a variety of shutter speeds and ISO settings and checking my results often to get the best effect. And it was this particular setting that not only revealed the comet, but strange streaks moving in random directions all over the sky around it. The question was of course, what were they?
The next day, my astronomer friend Dave Christie explained it to me. “John” he said, “those are satellites orbiting the earth, lit by the sun and so made visible low on the horizon.” Further to this, he noted that because we are looking across near space rather than directly overhead, the number of satellites appears greater than we would otherwise see if we could spot them overhead.
Well I’ll be damned. Space junk… err, communication satellites! I wasn’t expecting that. Normally, these wouldn’t be so visible, but with the sun shining off their metal bodies, they glowed in the last rays of the sun high above earth’s atmosphere. That high ISO and long enough shutter speed had frozen their movement across the sky.
My plan was to locate the comet with my normal lens and move increasingly closer to it with my 150-600 as I had in October of 2024 of Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, but I failed to focus on the comet properly with my superzoom, missing the close up I had in my mind. Still, I can’t be disappointed with the image I got. Cue the Rolling Stones song.
The Beaver Moon
November 5, 2025
I caught the November moon a little higher in the sky than the Harvest Moon before it. I liked how the moonlight was mixing with the late ambient daylight to illuminate the last of the autumn colours on the trees across the valley. Days later, most of the leaves had fallen with the first snow of the year. Afain, proof that the passage of time is both predictable and relentless.
A Hole in the Sky
November 10, 2025
Sometimes I look up at the sky and see things I can’t explain. I watched this hole in the sky drift slowly past me and wondered what caused it and what held it together. I watched it float away for a good half hour ‘til it became too dark to see. All I know is that it held its form like some sort of metaphysical spaceship. Carry me away.
Aurora’s Return
November 13, 2025
It’s been a good year for aurora here in southern Ontario. We don’t often get to see so many and such strong displays in a single year and while some of the best displays in November were obscured by clouds, I always delight in seeing them when I can. Lady Aurora returned for a brief visit on November 13th. The clouds broke free for about 15 minutes letting me grab this shot while most of Ontario was covered by clouds. I barely missed capturing a fireball, a space rock flashing through Earth’s upper atmosphere. Wouldn’t that have been something. I actually saw it through the my camera’s rear display but it was gone before I could trip or remove the 2 second timer I had set to reduce camera vibrations.
So my advice to you wherever you are, is to keep looking up. You never know what you will see up there. And some of it is pure magic.
Thank you for reading My Photo Journal and my apologies to anyone who thought I had fallen into a black hole or something. I have received a few letters of concern, but I am doing just fine, or at least as well as might be expected. Feel free to leave comments below. As usual I will leave you with a tune. In my mind, one of the finest ever written.
As I looked your excellent photos, I made comments about almost all. I'm slow in getting this to you and it's long!
The Day has Begun is beautiful and inviting. The Corn Moon quite bewitching. In When Moonlight Overtakes the Night, the moon seems to be rising out of an orange film. I find The Northern Lights image somewhat ominous as if some dark substance is blocking the moon. The wide view of Aurora is magical. For me, Cottage Country holds mystery - an orange glow teasing the eye. Cobourg Beach may be my favourite as it is where I feel most alive. The First Harvest Moon lies sensuously in the sky, the second image teased by wild grasses like jazz brushes on a drum. In the Big Dipper photo, the clouds create a creature opening its giant mouth to the darkness. The Beaver Moon has sailed down from a cloud above. The Hole in the Sky beckons me to fly there, become part of it. Aurora's Return, again, creates the feeling of wanting to float up, to be part of the colour magic in the sky.
These photos are stunning, John! Absolutely beautiful 🤩