Lake Tyrrell Sky Mirror at night: Rob Embury’s astrophotography
The famous Sky Mirror effect really turned on at Lake Tyrrell when Rob Embury visited... have you ever seen a photograph quite like this?
Seven years ago Rob Embury was listening to The Black Swan, an album by US rock band Story Of The Year, and he was blown away by track 12, titled Pale Blue Dot (interlude). It’s not a song, but a monologue by the late astronomer Carl Sagan; over the course of one minute and six seconds Sagan riffs on the philosophical implications of a photograph of Earth taken by the space probe Voyager 1 in 1990, when it was six billion kilometres away. The title of that famous photo, Pale Blue Dot, describes the appearance of our distant planet: a tiny, insignificant speck on the vast black canvas of space.
“That really resonated with me, the idea of how small we are in the face of nature,” says Embury, a 42-year-old from Melbourne who works in digital marketing. He was inspired to take up photography, to start documenting the things he’d always sought out as a self-confessed “nature nerd”: storms and sunsets, otherworldly landscapes and dark night skies. He now runs a photography business as a sideline; it’s called Pale Blue Dot Photography, in a nod to Sagan’s monologue. In this self-portrait, Embury is pictured in the middle of Lake Tyrrell in north-west Victoria; the ephemeral lake was ankle-deep with water on this calm night in July – perfect conditions for the famous Sky Mirror effect.
Perhaps you’d like to read Sagan’s words, and imagine the pale blue dot of our planet, as you savour this image: “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisations, every saint and sinner in the history of our species. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”
To see more of Rob Embury’s photography go to
https://www.instagram.com/robemburyphoto/