Shot in the dark
Photographer Pete Collins works when the rest of us are tucked up in bed. He tells Lynn Leadbeatter why
he’s fascinated by Yorkshire’s dark skies.
The sweeping panorama from Sutton Bank, fishing boats bobbing in Whitby harbour, Swaledale hay meadows ablaze with colour – we all have our idea of that special Yorkshire view, the one that really sums up all the county has to offer. But our favourite landscapes share one thing in common. Most of us imagine them bathed in glorious sunshine, far less obscured by approaching dusk – and those are the images captured by photographers for countless greetings cards, calendars and coffee table books. Not so Pete Collins. Taking to the hills after sunset, he produces stunning nightscapes that set some of the Yorkshire Dales’ most majestic landscapes and man-made structures against a cosmic backdrop. The Milky Way lights up a stairway to heaven through the Gothic arches of Ribblehead Viaduct. Stars seemingly shower down over Whernside’s limestone pavements. A ghostly Thornton Force shimmers in the moonlight.
“The attraction is being out in the middle of nowhere on your own, late at night,” says Pete.
“It’s about looking up at the universe and feeling extremely insignificant. It brings back a childhood sense of wonder, almost like the feeling you had at Christmas when you were a kid.
“It’s just awe-inspiring but the work is also technical. The science of astronomy is every bit as important to me as capturing the Dales landscape as a foreground, because there is beauty in understanding what we are looking at when we gaze up at the night sky.”
As an active member of Heaton Park Astronomy Group in Manchester, Pete gives regular talks to school groups as well as Beavers, Cubs and Brownies working towards their stargazing badges.
“Take a look at Sirius, the brightest star in the sky,” he says. “Because it never rises very high above the horizon for us in the UK, it twinkles with many colours. If you show it to eight-yearold children and tell them that the light they are seeing left the star in the year they were born, it never fails to impress them. So yes, the Dales are inspirational to me – but not as much so as the wonders of the universe.”
Not that Pete could even begin to capture his nightscapes back home in Manchester. As well as providing foreground interest, the national park offers the low levels of light pollution against which the true scale of the cosmos can be appreciated. There are four Dark Sky Discovery Sites in the Yorkshire Dales: at Tan Hill Inn above Swaledale and at Hawes, Malham and Buckden. All are sufficiently isolated from major towns and cities that the Milky Way is visible to the naked eye.
“You can maybe see 50 stars from the middle of Manchester but a few thousand from darker areas of the Dales,” says Pete. “Yet even up here it can be black overhead while the lights from Preston and Blackburn cast a glow on the horizon.”
Identifying rural locations away from the glare of street lamps, traffic and security lights is only the first step to creating a nightscape. Pete plans many of his photographs a year in advance, starting by checking which constellations are in the sky at various times of year with planetarium software. Having decided on the backdrop, he then works out the direction that he will be shooting in and uses an Ordnance Survey map