Murray River starscape

At Echuca/Moama over the weekend for the Echuca Spring swimming carnival – it's N's swimming club's annual social event, where we all descend on the Echuca Aquatic Centre en-masse and take home half the medals... A great weekend, though I didn't take too many photos. I decided to concentrate on practising my star shots (again) and take advantage of a darker sky and the mighty Murray River as a foreground. Compare to this one from my back garden in August (25kms from light polluted Melbourne).

Stitched panorama (It's not easy to take a panorama in the dark, when you can't see a thing through the viewfinder – I just had to keep moving the camera a bit and hoping I wasn't going to be left with a big un-photographed hole in the middle to ruin the whole thing.) It was much darker in reality than this – the light on the river bank is from lights on the grass behind me. Spot me and my tripod in the shadows.

Bigger is better