The work

Long nights, faint signal

Almost everything here is a long-exposure deep sky image: emission nebulae, reflection nebulae, the dark dust lanes that hide between them, and the occasional galaxy. Most frames combine luminance, red, green and blue with narrowband hydrogen-alpha, so the faint ionised gas keeps its structure while the stars keep their natural colour.

Nothing is captured remotely. Every frame on this site was taken from the ground in Kuwait, carried out to the site and set up for the night, which is why the integration times matter so much — the faintest signal in these pictures was assembled a five-minute subframe at a time, across many separate nights.

Where

Observing sites

The desert site sits at roughly Bortle class 4.5 — genuinely dark for a small and brightly lit country, though never far from a horizon glow. The few frames taken from home were shot straight out of a Bortle 9 city sky.