Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Send in the Clouds
Posted on June 15, 2026
Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds, Waiau River, New Zealand
Sony α1
Sony 14mm f/1.8 GM
ISO 5000
f/1.8
20 seconds
Greetings from New Zealand.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that New Zealand is my favorite place to photograph the Milky Way. Because I only get down here once a year, I always choose June, when the Milky Way is up all night and New Zealand nights are longest.
The New Zealand workshop Don Smith and I each year follow pretty much the same itinerary, laid out in large part to match the spectacular scenery with the Milky Way. In the many years we’ve been doing this, I’ve accumulated many great Milky Way spots, and at least one at most of our overnight destinations. Lake Wakatipu: check. Wanaka: check. Aoraki / Mt. Cook: check. But Te Anau—where we spend three nights and visit both Doubtful and Milford Sounds—has always frustrated me.
The problem in Te Anau is two-fold. First, the town’s position on the shore of Lake Te Anau doesn’t offer any correctly oriented, easily accessible lake views in the hours immediately following sunset (we rely on a driver who must follow strict government safety rules that don’t permit him to drive all day, then go out again in the wee hours of the morning). And second, in winter, lake-hugging fog usually obscures the Te Anau night sky.
All that changed this year. After losing our Lake Wakatipu Milky Way shoot to clouds on the workshop’s first night, when we saw clear sky in the forecast for our first Te Anau night, Don and I reached out to friend and Te Anau-based photographer Douglas Thorne, who generously shared his favorite nearby Milky Way location. Turns out, it isn’t actually on the lake, it’s on the Waiau River that connects Lake Te Anau and nearby Lake Manapouri.
Normally Don and I try to get our eyes on a new location before guiding a group there, but we arrived in Te Anau too late that evening to do any scouting. Having lost one Milky Way shoot already, and with clouds forecast for the next two nights, we just decided go all-in on Douglas’s site. (But I have to admit, the control freak in me was a little anxious on the drive to this unseen spot.)
Foremost on my mind as we arrived was whether it would check all of our Milky Way boxes—boxes that are different for a workshop group than they are for a solo photographer or small group of more adventuresome shooters (because a group can only do what it’s most limited participant can to do). Not only do we require a photogenic foreground beneath a clear view of the Milky Way, we also need easy access (a short walk that’s easily navigable by all in moonless darkness). And finally, because we usually have several Milky Way first-timers, we want plenty of room for the entire group to photograph in close proximity, enabling Don and me to get everyone set-up, and to be easily available when someone needs help.
Hopping out of the van in the evening’s rapidly darkening twilight, the first thing I did was orient myself and scan the landscape in the direction the Milky Way would soon materialize. Seeing nothing but a lovely tree-lined river beneath wide open skies, I breathed small sigh of relief and mentally checked box one. Moving on to Milky Way boxes two and three (easy access and room for everyone), our driver Steve and I followed a wide dirt track up a little rise for no more than 200 feet, where we came upon a wide, open riverbank with more than enough room for our entire group: boxes two and three checked.
At first the Milky Way was only visible to our cameras, but soon the sky darkened enough (love those dark New Zealand skies!) to be seen by all. I started as I usually do when photographing the Milky Way: wide and vertical. Since the Milky Way is higher in New Zealand than most of the northern hemisphere locations where I photograph it, I used nothing but my 14mm f/1.8 prime lens, which gives me the best combination of wide field of view and light gathering capability.
With darkness complete, I pointed out the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds to the group, explaining to anyone listening that they are satellite galaxies gravitationally bound to the Milky Way and visible only in the Southern Hemisphere. Because the only time I can see and photograph the Magellanic Clouds is on my New Zealand trip, I always look for ways to include them. Unfortunately, the two Magellanic Clouds are separated from the Milky Way just enough to make it difficult to include all three in the same frame—it can be done in a wide horizontal, but the MCs and the Milky Way usually end up being too close to their respective sides of the frame to be compositionally palatable to me.
The other problem I’ve encountered when trying to include all three in one frame is that composing that wide at any of other my New Zealand Milky Way locations ended up requiring me to include less photogenic parts of the landscape. But this night I was pretty thrilled to see that a 14mm horizontal frame that included all three worked much better than any other location I’ve tried.
But instead of being satisfied with that, I got the (uncharacteristically) brilliant idea to try a vertical frame aiming straight upstream, directly at the two Magellanic Clouds (which were conveniently situated right above the river). Low and behold, not only was 14mm wide enough to capture both Magellanic Clouds and the river, it also enabled me to include a segment of the Milky Way above that was close enough to the galactic core to rival its brightness.
This turned out to be a successful night in many ways. In addition to my Magellanic Clouds / Milky Way triumph, everyone in the group got Milky Way images that made them happy (a point of emphasis—and stress—for Don and me until it happens), and we found a new Milky Way spot to share with future groups.
Join Don and me as we run it back in New Zealand again next year
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New Zealand Milky Way
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Looking Up Down Under
Posted on July 17, 2022
Milky Way and Small Magellanic Cloud, Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand
Sony a7SIII
Sony 14mm f/1.8 GM
ISO 1600
f/1.8
20 seconds
James Webb Space Telescope’s First Deep Field image
Are you as thrilled as I am by the mesmerizing images we’re seeing from the James Webb Space Telescope? There’s nothing like a heaping dose of perspective to remind humans of our insignificance in the grand scheme things, and these images deliver perspective in spades.
I think my favorite Webb image is the view deep into a seemingly tiny black region of sky that reveals thousands of galaxies. How tiny? According to the NASA website, “This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.”) The light from these galaxies traveled as far as 13.1 billion years to reach us, which means we’re getting a view of our nascent Universe as it was less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
I get another dose of perspective, albeit on a much smaller scale, each time I visit the Southern Hemisphere. After a lifetime living north of the equator, I pretty much take for granted the Northern Hemisphere night sky. When I’m outside after dark, I reflexively look up and locate the Big Dipper. Using the Dipper’s pointer stars, my eyes slide to Polaris (the North Star) to locate north, then slowly scan the surrounding sky for other familiar features: bright stars Arcturus and Spica, constellations Cassiopeia and Corona Borealis, among many. If it’s dark enough, I try to pick out the Little Dipper and the Andromeda Galaxy.
Looking up at night in the Southern Hemisphere is downright disorienting. Most of the stars and constellations are completely unfamiliar (but no less beautiful), and those that are familiar (like Orion), appear “upside down.” (There’s no true up and down in space because up/down, left/right is always relative to the viewer’s frame of reference.) The Milky Way down here is reversed, and I’ll never forget the first time I watched a Southern Hemisphere moonrise and realized that it moved left (north) as it rose—duh.
A personal Southern Hemisphere highlight is the opportunity to see the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Like the first (only) time I saw the Taj Mahal and Stonehenge, my first view of the Magellanic Clouds was like spotting a celebrity I’d heard about my entire life but never imagined I’d see in person.
The Magellanic Clouds are satellite galaxies of our Milky Way. The Large Magellanic Cloud is about 160 light years from Earth and estimated to contain 30 billion or so stars; the Small Magellanic Cloud is about 200 light years distant and weighs in at around 3 billion stars. It also appears the the SMC orbits the LMC, making it a satellite of a satellite.
In a dark Southern Hemisphere sky, both Magellanic Clouds appear as smudges of light, faint but clearly visible. The diameter of the LMC is about 5 degrees, while the SMC spans less than 2 degrees (for reference, the Sun and Moon are each about 1/2 degree across when viewed from Earth). None of Magellanic Clouds’ individual stars are bright enough to be resolved with the human eye.
About this image
In an earlier post I detailed the night I photographed the Milky Way over Cecil Peak and Lake Wakatipu. It was the first night of the New Zealand winter photo workshop Don Smith and I do each year, and we were pretty pleased that the conditions cooperated so nicely.
We came straight here from our sunset shoot, then waited for the sky to darken enough for the Milky Way to appear. Toward the end of the shoot, once everyone was locked in and feeling good about their results, I started to look for ways to do something a little different and my eyes landed on the Magellanic Clouds. But there were a couple of problems: first, there’s a lot of sky between them and the Milky Way, which was still going to be my primary subject; second, they were both above a blob of large shrubs (or small trees) on the lakeshore.
It’s times like this that I especially love the wide field of view of my Sony 14 f/1.8 GM lens. This lens is always great in New Zealand because the Milky Way’s core here is so high in the sky, the wide field of view enables me to get lots of Milky Way and foreground. This evening I found that by going horizontal at 14mm, I could in fact get the Milky Way and Small Magellanic Cloud in my frame without crowding either too close to the border.
But now the ugly shrubs were in my frame too. The solution for that problem was simply to walk about 50 yards up the lake. Engaging the Bright Monitoring feature on my Sony a7SIII (Sony shooters need to look up this underused feature that’s fantastic for night photography—mine’s assigned to a custom button on all of my bodies), I saw in my viewfinder that the shrubs were no longer a problem.
I only shot here for about 5 minutes, but by the time I made it back to the group, the group was ready to head back to the hotel for dinner—always a good sign that everyone was happy with their results.
Here’s my Photo Tips article on Milky Way photography
New Zealand Photo Workshops
Looking Up
Click an image for a closer look, and to view a slide show.
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 