One night in late Winter 2024, an initial trip to a location I'd scouted a few weeks earlier ended up being a dud, as I decided (possibly unfairly) that the lone tree was also not a particularly attractive tree.  So I headed a couple of miles away to another of the dishes at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory outside Cambridge. This time I was at the impressive 32m dish that's part of the Merlin array (along with Jodrell Bank), which is still in-use and on the night was whirring away as it collected data from distant sources.  Unusually for me, I ended up meeting up with a few other astrophotographers from a local WhatsApp group, one of whom had obtained permission for us to enter the grounds of the observatory to get more favourable compositions.

A stubborn frontal cloud dissected the sky for much of the night, leaving a decent window from the north west to the south east; unfortunately the north remained obscured for most of the evening, and none of the outstanding parts of the aurora display were visible (though I caught the weak remnants at the very end of the night on the way home).  But that meant we had a great view of Orion from a site that was surprisingly dark given it's only 5 miles from the centre of Cambridge (although not immune from poorly directed security lights!).

My focus was on some simple compositions including the magnificent dish; definitely somewhere at which I'd like to spend more time.