At the end of January 2025 I had a three day astro adventure over on the continent, but it started, fittingly, with one last shoot at home before the night ferry from Harwich. It was set to be the first properly clear night across East Anglia in what felt like weeks, so I arrived hours early and headed down to Dovercourt, where a pair of Victorian iron lighthouses stand out on a short causeway into the sea. Built in 1863 on screw pile foundations, an early and rather ingenious solution for anchoring iron structures into soft, shifting ground, they once worked as a pair, aligned from the water to guide ships safely into Harwich harbour. They’ve been redundant as working lights since 1917, but they’re still standing, still striking, and still exactly the kind of foreground subject I can’t resist.

I’d shot a moonrise here before, but I’d always wanted to come back for the Milky Way, or failing that, Orion. The catch with Dovercourt is that it sits only a couple of miles south of two of the busiest ports on the east coast, Felixstowe and Harwich, both throwing enough light into the sky to make anything faint a real challenge. Still, the sunset that evening was glorious, and once full dark arrived I set to work, trying a composition at 35mm and another at 14mm.

The wide shot didn’t survive contact with reality; that bulbous Samyang lens picked up every stray reflection going and the frame was unusable. But the 35mm compositions came together nicely, Orion held steady above the old iron towers, and I got a couple of hours on the beach in the cool night air that I was more than happy with. Waiting for a ferry has never felt so good, sea air, dark sky, and the kind of quiet anticipation that only comes before setting off on an adventure with a friend on the other side of the water.