Mt Ruapehu, Tongariro and Taranaki are McKay\u2019s favourite spots to shoot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tend to drive to a remote spot where it\u2019s clear and set the camera up,\u201d McKay said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s better than waiting for the weather to come to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
His composite images capture local landscapes beneath high-definition images of space, aiming to provide viewers with context about where things sit in the sky above.<\/p>\n
McKay\u2019s final \u201cpiece of the puzzle\u201d is adding nebulae \u2014 interstellar clouds of gas and dust, hard to see with the human eye.<\/p>\n
The Carina Nebula and Orion Nebula (Te Hao o Rua) are among the brightest nebulae visible from Earth.<\/p>\n
McKay captures them through full-colour panoramas of dust in space using a dual-band filter, which eliminates all light except the two spectra nebulae consist of \u2014 Hydrogen-alpha and Oxygen III. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about enhancing what\u2019s actually there, and not generating something that isn\u2019t,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t like to fake anything or do generative AI, if I can absolutely help it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opportunities to capture night sky images increase during Matariki and around the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. <\/p>\n
McKay spent his Matariki weekend on Tongariro.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just happened to align with good weather over a long weekend, so it was really just a no-brainer.\u201d<\/p>\n
The moon was also well aligned and not too bright, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was actually quite lucky because all we had was a little crescent moon.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was lighting up the snowy mountains for me, which was quite special.\u201d<\/p>\n
McKay recalls creating two of his favourite images across the region. <\/p>\n
Last month, he captured a \u201csurreal and unexpected\u201d panorama of aurora australis over Kai Iwi Beach, despite nearby light pollution. <\/p>\n
A panorama of aurora australis and the Milky Way over Kai Iwi Beach in June. Photo \/ Evan McKay<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew right after dark you\u2019d get the Milky Way arch, kind of, centred over south, and of course the aurora is in the south.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another of his favourite images was taken on a recent venture to Hangatahua (Stony) River on Taranaki maunga.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a particular alignment where you can get the Milky Way just erupting out of the mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n
Good weather was forecast, and it was potentially one of the last days he could get the alignment, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I thought I might as well go for it.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough there wasn\u2019t much snow on the mountain in early June this year, the low clouds partially wrapping around the maunga more than made up for it.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes it\u2019s worth revisiting familiar locations. While the stars might remain constant, the landscape is never quite the same, and each visit tells its own story.\u201d<\/p>\n
McKay said the number of satellites in the sky had increased significantly over his years as a night sky photographer.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re an eyesore. They\u2019re just extremely distracting. I don\u2019t like having the satellite trails all through my images.\u201d<\/p>\n
McKay uses the statistical method of sigma-clipping to remove them from his images.<\/p>\n
Exploring the night sky through astrophotography had opened his eyes to the scale of things, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou see pictures from Hubble of all these nebulae and galaxies and stuff, but you don\u2019t really know where they are in the sky … you\u2019re actually looking at such tiny, little parts of the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n
McKay plans to automate more of his \u201cincredibly time-consuming\u201d star data collection process and buy a four-wheel-drive vehicle.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the places I go are a little bit more adventurous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Noam M\u0101nuka Lazarus (Ng\u0101ti Wh\u0101tua o Kaipara) is a multimedia journalist at the <\/b>Whanganui Chronicle<\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Known as Galactic Kiwi, McKay spent the past year trying to \u201cperfect\u201d his new photographic niche, combining the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[267],"tags":[365,362,363,364,13548,7976,252350,252349,5190,34613,366,98099,18,40092,117,190443,24244,29615,4080,6154,3519,19,17,69719,1024,7973,236525,430,252348,451,1214,4612,23602,836,14612,96586],"class_list":["post-595949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-astrophotography","tag-award","tag-bought","tag-bug","tag-camera","tag-collecting","tag-design","tag-developed","tag-eire","tag-electrician","tag-entertainment","tag-evan","tag-first","tag-flight","tag-for","tag-from","tag-game","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mckay","tag-nasa","tag-on","tag-pastime","tag-photos","tag-shortlisted","tag-space","tag-the","tag-top","tag-up","tag-video","tag-when","tag-worlds"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}