Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land
Now I understand

Don McLean, Vincent (1971)

Not too many daffodils, winter chills or any chance of snow, but we did enjoy the stars.

Israa and Miraj Night is an Islamic holiday and it gave us a long weekend. So we were able to make the relatively long trip back to our favourite spot on Al Jebel Al Ahkdar in Oman and spend two nights in the relative cool of the mountain. On this trip it was 42º at the base and 26º at our camp site.

The newspapers had been full of information about a meteor shower so I had done lots of reading about how to photograph stars and we fully expected a dazzling display on both nights. Not sure what went wrong but for whatever reason the meteors didn’t turn up. We saw about half a dozen in total. I don’t think that counts as a shower.

We did, however, have beautiful clear nights to experiment with photographing star trails. For the photographically minded the technique involves setting your camera to continuous shooting, as in sports mode, cranking the ISO up to about 3200, opening the aperture as wide as possible and setting the shutter speed to the longest possible which usually means 30 seconds. Then you need your camera on a tripod and a remote shutter release thingy that can be set to lock and so keep the shutter release pressed down for as long as you like. Next you point your camera at the sky – preferably towards the pole star so that you get circular patterns of stars revolving around it. Then press and lock the shutter and go and drink red wine around the camp fire for at least an hour while the camera takes one 30 second exposure after another.

The results on the camera are just simple shots of the night sky with lots of tiny dots for stars but once you get back to your computer you can merge them altogether with special software. I used StarStax – its a free download for Mac and PC.

Here are some of the results..

The whole weekend felt like a holiday with late breakfast and even later coffee before we even thought about leaving the camp site. We did manage a new walk through the numerous wadis nearby and through an abandoned settlement that we had no idea was in the area. We have no idea how old the dwellings were or when they were abandoned. The fig tree next to one lot of ruins must have been there for quite a while.

For another first, Sue managed to create damper in a camp oven. This was probably the reason we were so reluctant to leave camp – we had simply eaten too much breakfast.

A fabulous weekend but it ended with the longest border crossing yet. For once it was nothing to do with cues or immigration officials. After we had parked to get our passports stamped at the UAE border the car would not start. A whirring  started motor indicated problems that we couldn’t fix and led to long wait for a tow truck and eventually depositing the car at a local Toyota dealer for repairs. Turned out to need a new started motor. The scary part was that this was the first time we had stopped the engine since leaving the mountain. If the started motor had failed just one engine start earlier we would have been without phone coverage and about 10 km from the nearest habitation. It really would have been a long weekend.