Eyeing the Open Sky

From the photographer: “A few days after the total Solar eclipse in Exmouth, our Western Australia road trip brought us to Monkey Mia in Shark Bay, where we stayed for 2 nights. On our last night under dark skies before returning to Perth, we decided to hit the road at 3 am from Monkey Mia to reach another location 70 km away, which is Shell Beach, again part of Shark Bay.

The sky was clear for 60 km. Then we saw a few clouds in the south as we were getting closer to Shell Beach. When I parked the car, more than 30 degrees of the southern horizon was covered with the clouds. In the few minutes we walked down to the beach, clouds covered more than half of the sky. I set up the camera as quick as I could and shot the panorama of the northern half of the sky, as the clouds continued to drift to the north.

The view was sublime, it was very dark and totally silent apart from the small ripples of the sea water. But I do wonder how nice that sky could have looked, if we were able to reach there half an hour earlier. Next time…”