Gallery · 30 plates · 2018 – 2026
A selection of the captures we are happiest with, from a quiet arc over Kilpisjärvi in 2018 to eleven hours on the Pinwheel Galaxy last February. Filter by subject, then open any plate for the full story and exposure data.
About these plates. Our originals are stacked RAW and FITS files of 60 to 900 megabytes each — far too heavy for friends reading this on a cabin connection in the fells. So every capture on the site is shown as a small vector plate: a redrawing of the final image that Aino’s script traces from the processed frame, keeping composition, colour and mood in a few kilobytes. If you would like a full-resolution file for a talk, a school or a print, just ask.
Showing 30 of 30 captures
Aurora
First big display of the season, Kp 6. The curtains folded over Saana for forty minutes while the lake below was still open water. Five-second frames kept the folds sharp.
Aurora
Kp 8 for two three-hour windows. For most of the night the aurora sat in the southern half of the sky: the oval had expanded south past us. Deep red above, a magenta lower border below.
Aurora
The great May 2024 storm, seen in a sky that never got dark. At 00:20 the Sun was only about eight degrees below the horizon, and still pink and violet rays showed against the blue.
Aurora
Before the storm broke up, one calm, bright arc stretched from horizon to horizon for about twenty minutes. Taken from the summit path with a head torch taped red.
Aurora
After the main substorm the sky broke into patches that switched on and off every few seconds. A fifteen-frame stack keeps their outlines soft, the way the eye actually saw them.
Aurora
Kp 7. The corona opened straight overhead at 22:41 and the whole sky moved for eleven minutes. Pointing a 14 mm lens at the zenith is the only way to fit it all in.
Aurora
Our first properly red aurora. The tops of the curtains glowed crimson — oxygen emission from around 250–300 km up — while the familiar green sat below.
Aurora
No ice yet and no wind: the lake gave a perfect reflection for about twenty minutes, until a fishing boat came home and broke the surface.
Milky Way
The first moonless dark night after the summer. The Great Rift splits the Milky Way through Cygnus, which passes almost overhead at this latitude in early September.
Milky Way
The faint winter Milky Way through Perseus and Auriga, down towards Gemini. −29 °C: the tracker’s grease stiffened after two hours and the last six frames trailed.
Milky Way
A single untracked frame from the fell-centre car park after the last visitors had gone. Ruska colours on the ground, Cassiopeia and Cygnus in the band above.
Milky Way
A quiet arc low on the northern horizon and the Milky Way overhead: the early-autumn combination we wait for every year. The oldest plate on this page.
Star trails
A borrowed kota with a fire inside and two hours of sky turning around Polaris, which stands almost 68° high here. The doorway glow is the fire.
Star trails
Three hours at −27 °C with a USB power bank inside a wool sock. The gaps between frames were closed in Sequator.
Deep-sky · M101
Four nights between 9 and 19 February. The pink knots in the arms are star-forming regions, hydrogen glowing about 21 million light-years away. M101 passes 77° high here.
Deep-sky · NGC 7000
The first target from the new roll-off shed, collected over three nights as darkness returned. The dual-band filter cuts through a half Moon and the glow of Sodankylä.
Deep-sky · IC 1805 & IC 1848
Both nebulae sit in Cassiopeia, which never sets here and culminates 84° up. Two cloud-free nights out of five — a good week for November.
Deep-sky · M31
Our first image with a cooled astronomy camera. M32 and M110 are the two small smudges. Two and a half million light-years, six hours, one very cold laptop.
Deep-sky · M81 & M82
−34.8 °C, our coldest session. Three batteries died before midnight. Both galaxies pass within two degrees of the zenith here, so there is almost no atmosphere in the way.
Deep-sky · NGC 869 & NGC 884
The orange dots are red supergiants among hundreds of young blue stars. A forgiving first target: bright, colourful and always up.
Deep-sky · M45
Seitsentähti, the seven stars, in Finnish. The blue haze is dust reflecting starlight, not part of the cluster — the stars are just passing through it.
Planets
−27 °C with Jupiter 45° high in Taurus. Ten three-minute videos stacked and derotated in WinJUPOS; the Great Red Spot was near the central meridian at 23:10.
Planets
Mars was only 14.6 arcseconds across but stood 47° up in Gemini, which is as good as it gets for us. The north polar cap is the bright spot at the top.
Planets
Saturn reached only 19° altitude, so the seeing was rough. But the rings, tilted just a couple of degrees towards us, made the trouble worth it. Titan is the dot on the right.
Planets
Four days before inferior conjunction, about nine degrees from the Sun, in full daylight. We kept the Sun hidden behind the barn roof the whole time. Please do not try this without a solid obstruction.
Comets · C/2023 A3
Low in the west-south-west at 19:40, with a tail longer than our 35 mm frame could hold. Four days after the big October aurora storm — a ridiculous week.
Comets · C/2022 E3 (ZTF)
At its closest to Earth the comet passed near the celestial pole, so from here it never set. The green comes from diatomic carbon in the coma.
Comets · C/2020 F3
The only comet we have ever photographed in summer. The Sun had just set below the northern horizon and the sky never went darker than deep blue.
Moon
The Moon rose already inside Earth’s shadow, dim and copper-coloured, and we needed binoculars to find it at first. Totality ended a little over an hour later, at 21:53.
Moon
Day nine is our favourite: the terminator runs through the Imbrium basin and the crater walls throw long shadows. Stitched in Microsoft ICE.