Edinburgh and beyond
This is a wee bit different from the usual Real Edinburgh stuff but it’s still essentially Edinburgh, just maybe an angle on it you’ve never really seen before. One of my “other” photography interests is astro-photography, i.e. anything that’s not in the Earth’s atmosphere. There’s a long held misconception that you can’t get the best of the night skies from Edinburgh due to the light pollution from the city, but that in fact, is bollocks. These 3 shots were taken up by Harlaw Reservoir, just above Balerno out to the western edge of the city. Looking east or north you get the lights from the city, looking south and west it’s perfectly dark, proper dark. Even more so when the moon isn’t rising till the early hours of the morning and flooding out the sky with light.
This was the International Space Station crossing over the Pentlands at twilight tonight, it’s about a lot over the next couple of weeks passing over us around every 90 minutes.
ISS crossing the Pentlands
From last night at Harlaw, this is the Milky Way, the densest part of our universe, which is why it appears as it does. To be fair, you wont see this with the naked eye from here but the camera picks it up.
Milky Way at Harlaw
To end with, the 2 bright stars in the left of the shot are Jupiter to the top and Venus to the bottom, 2 plants in one shot. At the moment, Mars is visible in the east at night after 8pm and Saturn to the south east after midnight. In a few weeks Mercury will also be visible, all to the naked eye.
Venus and Jupiter over Harlaw
Next time your sitting there surfing the Sky tv looking for a repeat of Top Gear because the telly is crap, if it’s a clear night why not try a little jaunt out to the Pentlands and look up?
Real Edinburgh 
Now all you need is to a picture of an aurora 😉