Arthur River, Tasmania, 18 October 2023
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Couta Rocks.

We were driving from Corinna and Pieman River to Arthur River, where we would have another river cruise.  On the way we stopped at Couta Rocks.  We also stopped at Nelson Bay but I didn’t take a photograph there.

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Edge of the World, here looking towards Arthur River.

We had reached Arthur River and are now at Edge of the World.  This is an actual place name.  I guess we can now say “We’ve been to the Edge of the World and didn’t fall off”.  It is called this because as you look out to the west, from high ground, and get on your tippy-toes and squint, you might see a snow-covered mountain in the distance.  But that would only mean you were hallucinating and should lay off the opiate painkillers, because there is nothing but ocean for 10,000 kilometres, across the Southern Ocean, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, until you hit Peninsula Valdes in Argentinian Patagonia.  I was there in 2011, when I saw a zorro and a zorrito (an Argentinian fox and an armadillo), sea lions, elephant seals, a turkey vulture and orcas.  As far as I could tell, there were none of those to be seen at Edge of the World.

It’s a nice place to potter around but the reason I came was to case it out for a potential Milky Way photograph later that night.

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Black Currawang, endemic to Tasmania.

There is also a grey currawong and the Tasmania subspecies is black but this is nonetheless a black currawong.

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Closely related to Australian magpies and therefore, super smart.

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It is a calm day.  It must be quite spectacular here in a storm.

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This is the odd one out.  It is not at Edge pf the World but at a beach just north of Arthur River, taken 20 minutes later.  I do not know the name of the beach.

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Fortunately it was a clear night and when we returned to Edge of the World later, I was able to create this image of the Milky Way.  It is lying flat over the horizon and the moon is also just above the sea.  It is well past sunset and the pink colouration and streaks are from the aurora australis.  The camera picks this up much better than the human eye can, which is somewhat handicapped after dark, and we were not aware of it at the time.  There are also some fine lines in the pink area in the middle.  I presume these are satellite trails.

For those interested in the technicalities, it was taken with a modern Nikon Z6ii camera and an ancient Nikon 16mm f3.5 fisheye lens (nearly 50 years old, just as sharp as a modern one) and later “defished”.  Exposure was 60 seconds at f3.5, 5,000 ISO.

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