In July 2016, Fred and I headed to the Gozo for 2 nights of landscape and astrophotography. We wanted the freedom to travel from one location to another and spend the night on location, so instead of booking an apartment, we decided to do a bit of car camping. We crossed over to Gozo in the afternoon and headed straight to Dwejra on the western tip of the island. The weather was forecast to be completely clear, but the strong north westerly wind meant the sea would be rough.
We shot the famous Azure Window at sunset. There weren’t any clouds, which was exactly what we had hoped for since the main objective of this trip was to shoot star trails and the Milkyway. I shot this long exposure shot with some great light from the setting sun coming in from the left of the frame.
One of my favorite shots of the Azure window in Dwejra, Gozo. Shot at sunset on a clear day with rough seas.
After sunset, we headed up the hill to the Dwejra tower. We set up our cameras for star trails and the Milkyway and settled down to cook dinner. As the Milkyway began to move into the right position over the tower, we started trying to capture it. The distortion from being so close to the tower makes it look wonky which bothered me quite a bit, but this is the image that I captured.
A 3 hour star trail over the Dwejra Tower.
After this, I headed down to capture the Milkyway over Fungus rock, by this time, there was a fine haze in the air, and the Milkyway wasn’t as clear as I had hoped.
The Milkyway over the Dwejra Tower.
We didn’t get any sleep that night and after sunrise headed to Xwejni salt pans where we set up our tents in the shade and tried to get some sleep. After dismantling our tents we went for a quick swim and some lunch.
After lunch we headed to a nearby shop to buy some steaks and then went back to Dwejra to shoot sunset again.
The Azure Window at Sunset on the second day, we again had clear skies and rough seas.
Sunset wasn’t particularly good, so we set up our camera in place to capture a star trail over the Azure window. As it got darker, the hordes of tourists began to leave and we started our star trail sequence before cooking our lovely steaks on the bbq. We then had to check our cameras every 30 minutes to ensure they were not full of sea spray as the crashing waves and wind had a habit of filling the lens with spray.
A 4 hour star trail over the Azure Window in Dwejra, Gozo. We had planned to shoot this for longer but unfortunately some thick sea fog rolled in and cut our plans short.
After a couple of hours of enjoying a really clear night sky, we noticed that the stars began to disappear, this was our worst nightmare, a thick sea fog had rolled in and ruined what we had planned to be a 7 hour long star trail / timelapse sequence. We dismantled our cameras and called it a night, finally getting some proper sleep in our tents. The next morning we woke up and headed back to Mgarr to catch the ferry back to Malta.
A close up of the Milkyway. There is plenty of nose in this image due to it being captured on an old crop sensor body. Shooting with such extreme settings (ISO 12800) is one of the few occasions where a newer camera body can produce an image which is much cleaner, has more detail and less noise.
This trip was bitter sweet, we missed our opportunity to capture what we had hoped would be a 7 hour long star trail, which was fine, we planned to return the following summer to try it again. The thing we didn’t know at the time was that neither of us would ever see the Azure window again, as the following winter it would be consumed by the sea during a heavy storm on the 8th of March 2017.