Jim Richardson

Vigil at the Stones: Frame 9,068

©National Geographic Society

Frame 9,068 came at around 2:30 a.m.

There by myself amongst the timeless standing stones of Callanish, I kind of lost track of time. The night's calm was as powerful as the stones. Around midnight, as the last of midsummer's light in these northern latitudes faded into a deep blue in the north, I thought:  I don't need to be rushing around. I can stay here all night.

In the nearby village I could hear the occasional barking dog and an unexplained sound that I eventually attributed to the earth adjusting itself to the passage of time.

It was peaceful. I was peaceful.

With that peace came the inner time to work on this picture -- to really stretch my seeing and try to bring something to a photograph of a place that has been photographed countless times before (including by me).

After all, it's not like I was seeing something new that nobody had ever seen before.  These stones were put up by the local folk sometime around 2900 BC.  That's before Stonehenge!  Without doubt there were spiritual structures here before the stones.  Before that, this place had been sacred for a very long time.

My Guide to the Milky Way

OK, this is cool. Sky Voyager on the iPhone!  Let me tell you why.

Anybody who has seen my photography in the last couple of years will have noticed that I'm fascinated with shooting the Milky Way.  And everybody should know by now that to take pictures of the night sky you need a really, really high ISO camera (like my Nikon D3.

But there's another tool that will make life a lot easier.  You see, you really need to know when and where the Milky Way is going to make itself available.  It rises and sets just like the sun and the moon. Knowing when that's going to happen from a given location can save you a lot of fruitless, sleepless nights.  

That's where SkyVoyager comes in. It's a really nice, easy to use astronomy program from Carina Software.  I've used it for several years. It'll tell you sunrise and sunset info as well as moonrise and moonset, and where these objects will be any time of the day or night, today or in the past or in the future.  So when I knew that I was going to be on Easter Island with the cool statues in January on just one day I could see that the Milky Way would be visible AND that the moon would set by midnight, giving me a shot at a picture.

Now comes the good part.  They just ported it over to iPhone!  It's not cheap, as iPhone apps go, costing $14.99. But, hey, if I've only got one shot at a great picture in a remote location, that's nothing.

The laptop version is easier to use, I think, but I'm glad to have both of them available.  SkyVoager and a $5000 Nikon D3 and you're ready!