Stars in his eyes

Josh Dury has been entranced by the solar system since childhood - joining him for an evening on Glastonbury Tor is Niall Hampton

- Josh Dury

He might have been shooting the stars since he was seven years old, but Josh Dury is adamant that astrophotography is for everyone – you really don’t need to be an astronomer. In fact, the advances made in camera technology over the past decade mean that capturing high-resolution images with low noise – the holy grail for astrophotographers – has never been so straightforward. All you need, says Dury, is a camera that can handle digital noise well, a wide-angle lens that will let in plenty of light via a large aperture and a solid platform to shoot from.

Having seen Dury on a local news programme, discussing the Northern Lights being visible from the UK (www.bit.ly/ dcm270joshdury_tv), we discovered that we had an expert astrophotographer based near Digital Camera HQ. Keen to see his passion for landscape astrophotography at first hand, Dury invited us to accompany him on a trip to Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, a famous location mentioned in Arthurian myth. So one evening in May, following weeks of waiting patiently for the right conditions, your correspondent found himself meeting Dury at the footpath to this conical hill which is just over 500 feet above sea level. But while Digital Camera might have been travelling relatively light, Dury had turned up with much of his full astrophotography rig in his backpack.

While setting up his tripod, I asked him about his photographic journey to date. Taking a degree in photography seemed logical for someone who had chosen a camera over a telescope to engage with the solar system – the passion for astronomy started in childhood, inspired by watching television programmes about Mars.