There are certain things you expect when heading up a Welsh hillside late at night to photograph a meteor shower.
Dark skies. A bit of solitude. Perhaps a few other photographers. Maybe some wildlife.
What I hadn't anticipated was accidentally gate-crashing a dogging scene.
I'd headed over to Esclusham Mountain, near Coedpoeth and Gwynfryn, with the intention of photographing the Perseid meteor shower. The forecast looked promising, it was ridiculously warm, and I had visions of coming home with memory cards full of spectacular meteors streaking across the night sky.
As I pulled into the car park, I was surprised by how busy it was.
"Oh," I thought, rather naively. "Lots of people have obviously had the same idea and come up here to watch the meteor shower."
How nice.
A shared appreciation of astronomy.
People coming together to marvel at the wonders of the universe.
Then I looked around a little more carefully.
Ah.
Apparently, we were all there to see different things in the dark.
I quietly gathered my camera gear and headed off up the hill, deciding that perhaps the best course of action was to avoid eye contact and concentrate firmly on astronomy.
437 Photographs of Almost Nothing
Once I'd found somewhere to set up, the meteor shower immediately started taking the mickey.
While I was assembling the tripod, sorting the camera and generally faffing around, I saw several meteors streak overhead.
Excellent!
This was going to be brilliant.
Camera ready. Interval shooting configured. Composition sorted.
And off it went.
437 photographs.
Four hundred and thirty-seven opportunities for the universe to cooperate.
Apparently, the meteors had other plans.
I'd somehow managed to see more of them while setting the camera up than I did during the entire time it was actually taking photographs.
Even better, one of my test shots, taken simply to check that the camera was pointing in roughly the right direction, captured one.
So apparently the secret to successful meteor photography is not to actually try.
Red Light Seemed Like a Good Idea
I'd brought my red-light head torch because red light helps preserve your night vision.
Very sensible.
Very professional.
There's just one slight problem.
It turns out that wandering across rough Welsh moorland illuminated entirely in red removes quite a lot of useful contrast from the landscape.
Is that a rock?
Is that grass?
Is that a hole?
There's only one way to find out.
Trip over it.
I spent a considerable portion of the night stumbling around like a visually impaired mountain goat, occasionally disappearing into bits of vegetation that I'd been absolutely convinced were flat ground.
I'm quite glad I was on my own.
Although, thinking about the occupants of the car park, perhaps I wasn't quite as alone as I thought.
Is Something on Fire?
There was another slightly surreal element to the night.
Smoke.
I could smell wood smoke drifting across from the fires burning in mid-Wales.
Initially, it was just a faint smell in the air.
Then it got stronger.
And stronger.
Eventually I found myself repeatedly turning around to look at the heather behind me.
"That's definitely coming from Wales... isn't it?"
At one point I was half expecting to discover that the hillside immediately behind me was ablaze while I'd been concentrating on photographing tiny streaks of light several million miles away.
Everything looked fine in the darkness, though, so I carried on.
The Meteor Photobomber
Eventually I decided to switch compositions and take some star trail photographs.
By this point I'd accepted that the meteors weren't particularly interested in appearing whenever the camera was specifically configured to photograph them.
So I pointed the camera elsewhere and concentrated on the stars.
Naturally...
Meteor.
Straight through the scene.
The final meteor of the night had effectively photobombed my star trail photograph.
Typical.
Apparently, if you want to photograph meteors, the technique is now clear:
Photograph absolutely anything except meteors.
Then I Turned the Head Torch On
Eventually it was time to pack everything away and walk back down.
After spending hours preserving my night vision with the red torch, I finally switched the head torch onto full white light.
And suddenly everything made sense.
There was smoke drifting across the entire hill.
Or mountain.
Actually, let's be realistic.
Hill.
It explained why everything had looked slightly hazy through the night and why some of the photographs had that soft, misty appearance I'd been optimistically attributing to atmospheric conditions.
Nope.
Smoke.
I'd basically spent several hours photographing the night sky through a very large, naturally occurring smoke filter.
Astrophotography in a T-Shirt
Despite the meteors refusing to cooperate, the smoke, the stumbling around in red light and the rather unexpected welcoming committee in the car park, it was a thoroughly enjoyable night.
And incredibly surreal.
Normally when I'm doing astrophotography I'm wearing several layers, a hat, gloves and eventually questioning every decision that has led me to stand motionless on a freezing Welsh hillside at two o'clock in the morning.
This time?
T-shirt.
It was astonishingly warm.
Standing on a Welsh hill in the middle of the night, beneath a sky full of stars, perfectly comfortable in a T-shirt just felt wrong.
Beautiful.
But wrong.
I didn't come home with hundreds of photographs of meteors.
In fact, out of 437 attempts, one of the best meteor photographs was a test shot and another meteor deliberately invaded a photograph that wasn't even supposed to be of meteors.
But that's photography.
Sometimes you go out looking for one thing and come back with something completely different.
A couple of meteors.
Some smoky star trails.
A few bruises from rocks I couldn't see.
And considerably more knowledge about the nocturnal social life of a Welsh car park than I had when I arrived.
I'd call that a successful night.
