French astronaut Sophie Adenot made history this month as the first French woman to perform a spacewalk. Back on Earth, space enthusiasts across France are finding their own ways to reach for the stars. In a five-part series this week, RFI meets some of them. First up is astrophotographer Aude Nowak, who climbs high into the French Alps to capture stars, nebulae and the Milky Way.
Nowak has been an astrophotographer for eight years. She began by photographing property before gradually swapping apartments for mountains and stars.
RFI joined Nowak in Chamonix, between Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi, as she prepared to spend another night under the stars.
“Bring good shoes and warm clothes,” Nowak had told RFI several days earlier.
Getting the pictures she wants means travelling far and, above all, climbing high. The destination for this trip was Brévent, an imposing rocky summit 2,500 metres above sea level.
Reaching it required two cable-car rides followed by a good hour’s walk along a winding, rocky and sometimes slippery route. Patches of snow were still lingering in June, while a marmot and three ibex appeared untroubled by the group’s presence.
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Hunting light in darkness
Nowak had scouted the location the day before and knew exactly where she wanted to pitch her tent. It faced Mont Blanc, which she calls “the king”, although its summit was still hidden in cloud.
“I’m going to sleep before and after taking the pictures,” she said.
At 11pm, after three hours of sleep, her alarm sounded as the night sky came into view. The sky had cleared completely, revealing the Great Bear constellation as well as Venus and Jupiter to the *** eye.
Nowak had other targets in mind. She wanted to photograph the Lagoon Nebula and the Milky Way between the Aiguille du Midi, Mont Maudit and Mont Blanc.
Wearing a down jacket and head torch, she set up her tripod and camera. The nebula is invisible to the *** eye from there, but the camera can capture its colours in the dark. An app on her phone showed her where to point the lens.
After a few minutes, the Lagoon Nebula appeared behind the mountain. Around 20 shots were needed to produce the image she wanted of the red cloud of dust and gas.
“It’s magnificent,” Nowak murmured.
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Keeping stars in focus
Capturing such colourful images requires a modified camera and a long exposure, usually around 30 seconds, to collect as much light as possible in the dark.
But with the Earth turning, just 30 seconds is enough to shift the image, leaving the stars blurred.
To counter this, Nowak placed an equatorial mount beneath her camera. “It’s a small motorised device that rotates the camera to follow the Earth’s rotation exactly,” she explained.
The device allows her to keep the stars sharp in her images.
Astrophotography requires both persistence and luck. Spending several nights in a row high in the mountains, in temperatures of only a few degrees, takes determination. The weather also has to be on your side.
“That’s the real challenge of astrophotography,” Nowak said.
Some images can be captured on only a few days each year. “If the weather is bad, you have to wait until the following year or the year after that,” she said.
Nowak had waited two years to take the photographs she captured that night.
“The first time I tried, the weather was too bad, unlike what the weather app forecast. Coming back down from the mountain with nothing is heartbreaking.”
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‘Mountains are my world’
Another challenge is light in the sky from objects other than stars.
“Satellites in particular leave trails on the images,” Nowak said, adding that she had seen their numbers increase in recent years.
Image-processing software can remove the trails fairly easily, but it does not always work. And yet “removing them manually on the computer is painstaking work”.
Despite the difficult climbs, unpredictable weather and cost of cable cars and parking, Nowak is attached to her working environment.
“Mountains are my world. I know the history of mountaineering. So when I see peaks, I see routes, stories of mountaineers. Combining that with the sky speaks to me. I find it moving,” she said.
Seeking out difficult-to-reach places is part of the attraction.
“I like going after things that aren’t easily accessible. It’s part of my personality. I like bringing back a little piece of the beauty of the universe for people who don’t all have access to these places.”
Although every month is different and climbing into the mountains costs money, Nowak said she makes a living from her p***ion. Her photographs rarely remain on her camera’s memory card for long. They are printed in large formats, exhibited and, in some cases, sold.
She also values meeting and talking to the people who see her work.
“What motivates me is understanding why they buy my work and how my images make them feel. I think that’s wonderful,” she said.
Halfway to 82 peaks
Nowak does not believe she will tire of photographing mountains and stars, partly because she has yet to complete the challenge she set herself.
Her goal is to photograph celestial objects from every Alpine summit above 4,000 metres. There are exactly 82 of them across France, Switzerland and Italy.
“I must have done about half of them,” she said with a laugh.
This article has been adpated from the original version in French by Baptiste Coulon
