The stars as seen from Singapore

On a particularly clear night some time last year, I discovered that the stars seen from Pasir Ris were surprisingly bright for a heavily light-polluted city like Singapore. So some time in May on a new moon, I got out my flimsy tripod that I had received for free (and which died in Wales by freezing) and put my camera on it. This was my second time shooting stars, after trying it out in Taiwan and ending up with some terrible pictures. I've made some improvements since, I think. I used a 50 mm prime and I know that's not a good choice for astrophotography but the widest aperture on my kit lens was and still is too small:

f/1.8, 15 s, ISO 800, 50 mm, Nikon D610

Two months later, I accidentally caught the milky way! But I didn't (and still don't) quite know how to make it pop out:

f/3.5, 25 s, ISO 500, 24-85@24 mm, Nikon D610

In November, I decided to make a personal commemoration of Armistice Day which falls on 11 November. It's not celebrated here because of, on top of our dormancy in WWI, its association with wartime Britain who surrendered Singapore to the Japanese in WWII. It is with perhaps a touch of spite and irony that the surrender is instead nationally commemorated. 

A waxing new moon and clear skies made a rare combination (it rains almost every day at the end of the year in Singapore) on the night of the 13th, so I took my tripod and camera out to the central business district at about 2200h in search of our much-neglected cenotaph built by the Straits Settlements government after WWI. It was sitting in the middle of Esplanade Park which was in turn in the middle of a - in my view - hideously light-polluted area, complete with dancing lasers and spotlights shining through the clouds and turning the sky a sickly green. But, although not fit for the photography, it was fit for the occasion:

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning...

I had looked up star trail techniques in light-polluted areas; the most widely used turned out to be stacking hours of consecutive short exposures of up to 10 seconds. I used exposures of 5 seconds instead because even 10 seconds would be too long for this level of light pollution. I also took less than two hours of exposures since Singapore is almost on the equator, which means the stars here make (or the Earth makes the stars make) longer trails in a shorter amount of time. Also, the last MRT (subway) train left before midnight.

The next day I stacked all the pictures I took the night before and this was what I got:

f/4, 5 s (multiple), ISO 800, 24-85@24 mm, Nikon D610

I'm pretty happy with it, except that with a wide angle lens I could've got a picture closer to what I had in mind, but I'm not getting a wide-angle lens anytime soon, it seems. I also like how stacking images cancels out automatically noise made by high ISO.

Then in March of the following year, my last year of uniform-wearing school, I had to attend my school's photographic society's annual camp, meant to acquaint the new members with the old ones of which I am part. It was pretty uneventful; the only part I enjoyed was teaching the juniors about the camera and photography. At night, I couldn't sleep (I had insomnia for that entire year), so I borrowed one of the society's expensive and heavy tripods, a combination I'm not used to, and lugged it out to one of the school fields to shoot the stars. I wanted to include the school's clock tower, but because it was and is also likely the world's shortest clock tower, my picture became within reach of the light pollution beneath the tower, so I didn't get many stars. It was still a welcome break from turning and tossing in my sleeping bag though:

f/3.5, 25 s, ISO 1600, 24-85@24 mm, Nikon D610