Another night at Horton Tower

Another clear night struck my radar this week and I finally decided to plan a trip to Horton Tower with significantly more fore-sight.
I spent a few hours going over maps and right-of-ways on-line before hitting the location before deciding how I would approach the location.
Last time we started from a foot-style at the bottom of the hill which resulted in about a 20-30 minute walk up the hill in the dark, which felt a little uncomfortable as, even though there are styles and paths they are occupied and functioning farmlands.

However I discovered there is a fairly easily accessible bridle-path that leads right in front of the tower and made reaching the location to shoot very trivial.
The noly problem with the evening was a lot of condensation forming on the lens and making the images go blurry halfway through the night. I noticed it pretty quickly but it is cause for concern.

Anyway, here are some still from the time-lapses I shot. (I'm saving the time-lapses up now for a longer vid in the future)

A night at Horton Tower

Another clear-night's sky.
It had been forecast by the met-office to be clear between 22:00 to 01:00.
I tend to take the forecasts with a pinch of salt these days with a 60% probability that what is stated to occur will happen as expected.
Accepting there is a 40% chance that the weather will change for the worse is good preparation for disappointment.

On this trip I brought an assistant (Mark), camping chairs, my D50 to play with while the D90 shot the time-lapse images and a backup plan.
The main site I wanted to see was Horton Tower, a tower built in the 1700's but if the weather was too poor for shots or we couldn't get near enough to the tower I had alternate locations to scope out light pollution and accessibility for future shoots.

One surprise was that the tower is lit on the inside which worked out quite well in the end as it gives some shape to the silhouette. Unfortunately though as most of the clear sky was during the lighter hours of the evening I didn't get as much of the stars as I'd like and in retrospect I'd rather have angled the shot further east.

The time-lapse video is best viewed if you click on the youtube button and view it on youtube itself.
Once there you can view it in fullscreen which helps compensate for my idiotic error in shooting in portrait but you can also up the resolution of the images.
It's a silent 13 second clip of clouds rolling in/over basically but still another test run that I'm fairly happy with.

Whilst the time-lapse was being shot my friend and I used the D50 to play around painting with light and got the following results.