Sentinels and Stars

It was another beautiful night, clouds scudding across the sky carried on a swift wind, winking out stars and then revealing them again at whim.

I decided that I wasn't going to let the darkness stop me getting out, so I headed up to the moor armed with headtorch, down jacket, tripod and other necessary paraphernalia.

I love night walking, it usually ends in pitching a tent high on a hill and this walk served to remind me why I enjoy it so much.

A familiar route will take on a whole new dimension. The colours that you remember are greyed out by your torch. Instead of the world existing 10 or 20 foot around you, it shrinks to 5 or 6, and then to billions as you can see the upturned bowl of stars and galaxies that are always there and almost always invisible to your eye.

If you've never seen stars so dense that at first you think they're clouds, and then you realise that there are stars in front of them! They're not clouds but galaxies! Or dense clusters of celestial objects that are so ridiculously far away that they could explode and we would never see the resulting light as we would be long long gone before it reached us. If you've never seen such things then it *must* be added to your list of things to do.

On top of the moor there was interference from man made light, but the show was spectacular regardless. But when you go to places that are absent of man made light, the show is awesome. A word I use too much, but in the case of a clear sky with countless stars, awesome is the *only* word.

Night walking is great but you have to be careful. You should really know the route in the daytime, have a good waterproof headtorch and spare batteries, and some common sense.

Anyone seeing me marching up the moor with my tripod and torch might have begged to differ about the common sense thing!

I had the moor to myself, apart from unseen creatures who were probably watching me with a mixture of amusement and bemusement. It was great. I saw the lit up vista's of Bradford and Leeds shining below and colouring the South Eastern Sky orange. I took a few photo's but a strange effect that mirrored the lights below, to the sky above rendered them useless. I'll have to work out what that was.

I took shots of the sky but they were hopeless unless you like your stars blurry! It was windy and no tripod in the world was going to help.

This photo was taken in the dark during a brief respite, and as I couldn't see the trig at all I was basically going for random focus, twisting a millimetre here, back a bit, left a bit, click and hope for the best!

I'm enjoying this :o)