Bunaw Milky Way

Bunaw Milky Way – County Kerry, Ireland

In August 2020, I spent around eight days travelling solo around Ireland in my second self-built campervan. There was no fixed itinerary. I travelled quickly down the east coast before slowing down to explore the south coast for the first time, eventually reaching Bunaw near Kilmakilloge in County Kerry.

Bunaw wasn’t a planned photography destination. It was simply where the road had taken me towards the end of the trip.

That night, cloud threatened any chance of photographing the stars. While resting in the campervan, I set an alarm so I could get up later and check whether the sky had cleared.

When the alarm went off, I stepped outside and moved away from the van. I closed my eyes for a moment to allow them to adjust to the darkness before looking up.

Almost all the cloud had disappeared, apart from one low bank sitting over the distant mountains. Above it was an incredibly clear Kerry night sky.

And for the first time, I could clearly see the core of the Milky Way with my own eyes.

Coming from the light-polluted skies of Belfast, the sight genuinely gave me a chill.

I immediately reached back into the campervan for my camera, tripod and shutter remote and spent around twenty minutes photographing the scene. My original intention was to create a much more ambitious multi-frame panorama, manually panning the camera across the night sky and later combining the exposures.

That panorama never became the photograph I had imagined. At the time, the Photoshop processing required was beyond my experience with astrophotography.

But among the photographs from those twenty minutes was this single exposure.

Captured at 00:29 on 13 August 2020, the Milky Way rises above the mountains of County Kerry, while a simple handheld torch was used to gently light-paint the gate and vegetation in the foreground.

Very little processing was needed in Lightroom to reveal what the camera had captured.

At the time, I remember feeling both delighted that I had photographed the Milky Way for the first time and disappointed that I hadn’t managed to create the more technically ambitious image I had originally envisioned.

Looking back at the photograph years later, that disappointment has long since disappeared.

Sometimes you go looking for the photograph you think you should make and come home with the photograph you actually made.

Photograph Details

Location: Bunaw, Kilmakilloge, County Kerry, Ireland
Captured: 13 August 2020 at 00:29
Camera: Sony A7 III
Focal Length: 28mm
Aperture: f/2
Shutter Speed: 30 seconds
ISO: 2000
Foreground: Light-painted using a handheld torch