In June 2021 I travelled up to central North Island at Horopito to be the host on a Photographic Society of New Zealand (PSNZ) Astro workshop. I had shot astro before, so I had a fundamental understanding of how to do it but the opportunity to shoot on Mount Ruapehu was too good to turn down.

I am not going into the technical details of Astra photography here as it is quite complicated and they are plenty of other articles on it but put simply you have to use the widest lines you can have the west aperture and shoot long exposures sufficient to have the stars shout. Most of the really good images that you will see are the result of stacking lots of images together in specialised programs which I do not have.

After a briefing in the afternoon followed by dinner we headed around the mountain to National Park to a car park at start of the one of the tracks on what is referred to as the Tongariro crossing. Astro is weather dependent and unfortunately the gods are not in our favour. They had been cloud coming in through the day and when we arrived at the car park light rain started to fall. Number in the party gave it after that stage but the rest of us get it up and heat it out into the dark. We had literally gone no further than five minutes down the train when the clouds cleared and the stars appeared. That gave us the first opportunity to practice everything.

Astrophotography has an almost magical element to it in that when the photo appears on the back of the camera you can see much more detail than what you are seeing with the naked eye. I think that is what makes it so appealing.

When the clouds rolled in again we continued on up the track to one of the huts on the trail. One of the tricks with astrophotography is that if you want to improve an image then have a foreground element in it. I’m not sure what the people in the hut thought of the group of photographers camping out in the dark.

I had taken both my Nikon D600 and Lumix G9 with me. The Nikon. was used for the main images while I had the Lumix set up for timelapse. Unfortunately the clouds limited that and all I got was a two second clip.

Day two of the workshop started after lunch with a session on post processing the images. Then late in the afternoon we headed back around to National Park where we stopped for dinner. We head up to The Château and walked up the track to the Tauranga Falls. unfortunately the weather was still not playing ball and we only managed about 10 minutes at the falls before the cloud packed down once again. At that stage most people gave up and we decided to head back to our accommodation for a little social.

When we got there we discovered that the cloud above the area was clear and so we were able to shoot for another hour. The grounds had a lake in the and David (the presenter) had brought with him some steel wall so I final shoot we created our own stars.

It was quite an enjoyable weekend even if the weather did not play for. Most people did manage to either get some usable shots or at least improve on the techniques which ultimately is the goal of any workshop.