On Saturday I want to go to Aiins World to take night photos. I seem to remember someone telling me that you don’t shoot night scapes in full night, but at dusk. This way you will have nice sparkly lights, but still a bit of natural light to show you the outlines of buildings. That means you need to know the time of sunset. According to my Google Calendar sunset is:
17:17 Sunset
17:46 End of civil twilight
18:19 End of nautical twilight
18:50 End of astronomical twilight
Say what?!
From what I can figure out Twilight (not the sad excuse for a film) is a period of time, while Dusk is the end of said period. For example, Sunset starts Civil Twilight and it is ended with Civil Dusk.
So, it would seem Sunset is the moment that the sun dips under the true horizon. I say true horizon, because we are able to see the sun even though it is not strictly speaking there any more. This is due to the bending of light by the earth’s atmosphere.I could be wrong about the definition of sunset here, but it will be only a few minutes difference.
After sunset come the periods when light starts to shift. From what I understand Civil Twilight is when light starts fading, but we can still see everything. Nautical Twilight is when you are able to see the stars for navigation, and Astronomical Twilight is when you can start making astronomical observations. After that it is fully night.
Since I have never really gone out to do nightscapes, I am figuring that either Nautical or Astronomical Twilight will be the periods I want to shoot in, thus about 17:45 to 18:30.
Photo of Prague Castle at Night linked from Wikimedia commons.
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