There is no better time to celebrate our region’s dark skies than at the Winter Solstice. KATE JUDSON explores astrophotography on the shortest day of the year.
Wairarapa’s international Dark Sky stardom is attracting hundreds of participants to astrophotography workshops – and award-winning photographer Glen Butler is not surprised.
“Mark Gee did one – there was absolute pandemonium, about 900 people tuned up,” Butler said.
Butler is a dark sky backer who works in an office by day, and when the kids are in bed and the townsfolk are asleep, is often out in Wairarapa chasing a boyhood passion.
He won gold at the 2022 New Zealand Astrophotography Competition with a lunar eclipse timelapse shot in Wairarapa.
Butler has a few secret spots on Wairarapa’s coast, which he’s found during lengthy off-road adventures.
“If you tell people where they are, it easily turns into the next ‘Wānaka tree’” [a willow growing out Lake Wanaka, it’s thought to be New Zealand’s most photographed tree].
Butler’s scientific background means he has a sophisticated understanding of light and the mechanics of photography, while technical advances in recent years have allowed him to use longer exposures and a higher light sensitivity to capture what our naked eyes cannot.
When Butler got his first camera at five, his parents “omitted” to tell him that there was no film in it and he was “none the wiser”. Now he’s passing on his passion to his own son, who he recently took out for a “touch of Aurora spotting”.
At the time, the 14-year-old exclaimed, “Dad, look at all those colours. Look at the beams. There’s reds and greens and yellows and stuff”, to which Butler replied: “I can’t see any of that, man. I am way too old for that”.
His longest photoshoots are the all-nighters. He sets up a timelapse for seven to eight hours, lets the camera roll and sleeps next to it.
Come the morning, he turns it off, gets in the car and drives back home over the Remutaka Range.
Through his part-time business, Night & Light Photography, he did a Wairarapa workshop with Greater Wellington Regional Council in September last year to help them understand the clear skies.
Butler said while tourists come looking for the pristine night skies, locals often don’t realise what they have on their doorstep.
“The coast is something else, absolutely my preference,” Butler said.
The Milky Way season and Matariki both start in June this year. Winter conditions are optimum, because the nights are longer and there is far less light pollution.
Wairarapa is the newest of 20 reserves accredited by the International Dark Sky Association, which states 80 per cent of international skies are degraded due to light pollution.
The dedication to secure this status was recently recognised at the annual Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand conference, where Wairarapa Dark Sky Association patron Maarten Wevers, chair Viv Napier, and dark sky reserve application lead Dr Tom Love received the Bright Star Award.
The award acknowledged the effort required to achieve accreditation for the reserve with the International Dark Sky Association and the reserve’s contribution to dark sky conservation in New Zealand.
