Great-Lakes
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Full Moon Eclipsed, Milky Way Revealed
During full moon, the bright moonlight washes out most of the interesting features in the night sky. What happens if the moonlight is blocked out?
This image, taken just after midnight of August 28, 2026 during a deep partial lunar eclipse, answers the question. Even when 96.3% of the lunar surface was in Earth’s shadow, the moon, the bright orb on the left, is still the brightest object in the sky. However, with the moonlight greatly dimmed, the Milky Way is now clearly visible, while airglow painted the sky green and red, Cities across Lake Ontario (Rochester, Buffalo and Niagara Falls) gave the horizon its golden glow.
This image is a three-panel mosaic shot with my 14mm ultra-wide angle lens, covering from the horizon to the zenith and beyond.
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Zodiacal Light over Icy Lake Huron
Zodiacal light, captured in March by the Lake Huron shore, when spring is around the corner and ice on the lake starts to retreat. The zodiacal light is the patch of light extending from the centre of the image to the top left, passing through Taurus, Aries and Pisces, three of the constellations on the zodiac.
Zodiacal light is sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust orbiting the sun. Imagine the ecliptic plane on which Earth (and to a good approximation, most planets) orbits the sun. On this same plane is the dust cloud, from Earth’s orbit to just beyond Mars, that gives us zodiacal light. There are various theories as to the origin of this dust, from debris left behind by comets, to dust whipped up from Mars.
At mid-latitudes, zodiacal light is best observed around the spring equinox looking west just after the end of dusk, or around the fall equinox looking east just before the start of dawn.
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Ferocious Lake Erie
Gale force wind sent Lake Erie churning at Port Stanley, Ontario. Winter storms are common occurrence in the Great Lakes, with wind gust frequently reaching 90-100 km/h.
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Unrelenting Waves
Lake Superior, churning from the steady wind on this September day. I wanted to capture the unrelenting waves pounding on the shoreline, sculpting the landscape, as they have been for millennia. A black-and-white long exposure suits the mood.
This image was accepted at the International Salon New York 2021.
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Rushing Waves
It was a particularly stormy late summer day by the Lake Superior shore. I spent a good part of the day watching giant waves crashing into boulders and rushing onto rocky beaches. I thought about how the relentless force of nature sculpted the shorelines over millennia, shaping cliffs, polishing rocks into pebbles, and making fine sandy beaches. I fired the shutter. The moment a wave breaking up on the rock was frozen in time, a testament to the power of nature.
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Sandstone Shore
A section of the sandstone shoreline at the Pictured Rock National Lakeshore in Lake Superior. Lighting was lovely this day with the sun making occasional appearances behind dramatic clouds. A gentle wave made a splash, adding some extra texture to the intricate layers of sandstone.
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Ebb and Flow
A study of light and patterns where the Great Lakes meet the shore.
It was a calm day with gentle waves lapping on the shore. The air was fresh from the earlier rain. As the sun made occasional appearances through the mostly cloudy sky, the receding water line turned into a golden ribbon with ephemeral form. An instant of the scene now lives on photographic paper, but that dream-like summer day will live in my mind for years to come.
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Early Bird
The lighthouse at Port Dover, Ontario basked in the warm morning sun, as a seagull flew by.
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Beaver Dam Sunset
Sunset by Georgian Bay, Ontario.
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Comet C/2023 A3 Meets Milky Way
A cosmic encounter of Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS and the Milky Way. Of course, this is true only from the perspective of Earth. The Milky Way is a vast galaxy of almost 100,000 light years across, while the comet was in the inner solar system and its light reached Earth in a matter of minutes.
This image, a stack of 9 individual exposures, was taken on October 24, 2024 by the Lake Huron shore in southern Ontario, 75 minutes after sunset. During this period called the astronomical twilight, stars and the Milky Way appear. The afterglow to the west is very dim to the naked eyes, but on long exposure it is a vibrant yellow and orange, turning into deep blue as one looks up.
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The Great Northern Lights Show, 2024
The aurora activities on May 10-11, 2024, was truly a great northern lights show. A series of violent explosions of a sun spot a few days earlier created the ideal condition for a Kp 8-9 storm (9 being the highest on the Kp scale) that lasted over 24 hours. Millions of people around the globe, including tropical areas like Puerto Rico and Africa, were able to see the aurora with unaided eyes. This image was taken on Pelee Island, the southernmost inhabited land in Canada. Even at such southerly latitude (42 degrees), aurora filled the sky.
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Underneath the Summer Sky
Milky Way, our home galaxy, can be seen year-round in the night sky. However, the most spectacular view can be found in the summer months, when the core of the Milky Way can be seen in the southern sky after dusk, as in this quintessentially Canadian nightscape. The summer Milky Way reveals itself during the evening twilight, as the sky darkens into a deep blue, behind the Georgian Bay landscape. The two brightest objects left of the Milky Way core are the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, both near opposition and shining brightly.
A 16-image stack renders the night sky with great details and low noise. The foreground was done with a 32-image stack.
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Midsummer Night’s Wishes
Meteor photography is part planning, part luck, and lots of time spent under the stars – check for moon phase and clear sky, find a safe, dark location (which hopefully is not mosquito-infested), and shoot lots and lots of exposures. For the annual Perseid Meteor Shower I typically capture a few thousand exposures over several nights, using two cameras. Usually a few dozen exposures contain meteors, some bright and many other dim. This one is a rare gem – two bright, colourful meteors, streaking through the sky close to the Milky Way, both striking during the same 15-second exposure time, and both within view of the camera.
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Neowise at Sundown
Comet C/2020 F3 Neowise behind the iconic Southampton Lighthouse on July 20, 2020. Comet Neowise was the brightest comet visible in the northern hemisphere since Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. It can be seen with the unaided eyes in July 2020.
Comets are “dirty ice balls” made up of ice, dust, and various organic compounds. As a comet nears the sun, the ice sublimes (turns into water vapour) from the heat of the sun, and the dust is pushed away from the comet nucleus by the solar wind, creating the dust tail.
This image was one of the 80 photographs selected to represent Canada in the 2022 Four Nations Photo Competition.
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Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS in Southampton
Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS was the brightest comet visible in the northern hemisphere since 1997. With its original from the Oort Cloud in the outer reach of the solar system, the comet was first spotted in January 2024 by the Tsuchinshan (Purple Mountain) Observatory in China, and then independently discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in February, which also confirmed it to be a comet.
This image was captured at the Southampton Lighthouse by the shores of Lake Huron, under an almost full moon. 65 frames were stacked for a total exposure time of 6.5 minutes in creating this image.
