Stargazing in Namibia – Astrophotography at Wilderness Little Kulala

Zooming in from the southern hemisphere, into Namibia, the Namib Desert and finally Sossusvlei, each of these locations offer optimal stargazing and astrophotography conditions. Kevin explains why.  

The southern hemisphere

As it turns out, the southern hemisphere is an ideal place to photograph the Milky Way. As Kevin explains, ‘The Milky Way core has a seasonality. Not everybody knows that.’ 

When the core of the galaxy is higher and therefore more visible to us, the sun’s position gets in the way. From about November until March, no matter where you are in the world, the core isn’t visible. 

‘But the Milky Way season coincides with the southern hemisphere’s winter’, Kevin tells me, ‘Which means nights are longer. You're in a place where the Milky Way core is visible for longer than it is in basically the entire northern hemisphere. It’s more convenient for stargazing.’ 

Namibia & the Namib Desert

‘Namibia's dark skies are famous, especially among nightscape photographers,’ says Kevin. ‘It’s held up as one of the very best possible places to go.’ 

Being such a sparsely populated country, there’s minimal light pollution – especially in wilderness areas like Sossusvlei in the Namib Desert, where Little Kulala is situated. The Namib in particular has great conditions for astrophotography, due to the low humidity and lack of particulate in the air. 

‘Being an incredibly dry place, the way the Namib Desert is, helps a lot,’ Kevin explains. ‘That causes the air to essentially have less heft to it, and less to reflect terrestrial light off of. So, you take that combination of a very pristine crisp dry night sky air, combined with it being such a dark place, and there being so little terrestrial light – it's really an amazing combination.’

These factors even counteract Namibia’s low elevation, which would ordinarily be a disadvantage for stargazing. 

‘You don’t have to get nearly as high as somewhere like the Andes,’ Kevin tells me. ‘The relatively low elevation, you would think would be a negative because the higher up you are, the less atmosphere there is between you and the stars. But the combination of nearly pristine darkness, plus a kind of perfect atmosphere overcomes the lower elevation.’ 

Kulala Wilderness Reserve & Wilderness Little Kulala

Kevin has photographed night skies in renowned stargazing locations like Bolivia, Chile, New Zealand, and his hometown of Sedona. Still, when asked about Kulala’s sky, he responds quickly: ‘One of the best I’ve ever seen.’ 

The skies themselves do most of the work, but Little Kulala’s position and surrounds certainly help. 

‘What we're going for with night sky photography is that sense of awe, that sense of wonder… To have a clear night sky in a very dark place that also has something unique and interesting in the foreground. Something that makes you ask, “Wow, where is that place?” – Kulala was just perfect for that.’

Ancient limestone and sedimentary formations frame the Kulala Private Wilderness Reserve, while Little Kulala camp sits in front of the dry tree-lined Aub riverbed. ‘It’s just a short walk into the trees to find amazing foregrounds that were really fun to shoot, and very interesting,’ says Kevin.

The Kulala Wilderness Reserve shares a boundary with the NamibRand Nature Reserve, Namibia’s first certified International Dark Sky Reserve and the second in African with Gold Tier status. I asked Kevin if he could recognise a difference between Kulala’s skies and those in an official Dark Sky Reserve, but the answer wasn’t black or white. 

‘It's hard to compare them because no two nights are the same. But I will say that there’s a combination of a lot of ideal conditions,’ he says. 
‘The night skies were maybe comparable to the Atacama Desert, for example, but that’s nowhere near as convenient a place, especially if you want interesting foregrounds.’ 

Kulala is a popular self-drive destination. The trip to Sossusvlei takes roughly five hours from the town of Windhoek, but once you’re there, there’s no further to go to see dark skies. 

‘I just took a group of people out recently [in Arizona], and we had to go so deep into the desert to an extremely inaccessible location. We got a trailer stuck on the way out there. I was worried about people getting heat exhaustion. It was an adventure, but it was difficult, because there wasn't much time of the night to sleep.

‘To compare that to Little Kulala, where I was literally sleeping in this amazing, comfortable bed, and I could wake up at any moment and look up and see this incredible night sky… How unique of an opportunity is that? And how much easier and more accessible.’

At night, the beds at Little Kulala become Star Beds – rolled out onto the deck beneath open skies. 

If you’re taking long-exposures, having a bed nearby couldn’t be more convenient. Rather than waiting out in the dark, you can climb into bed while the camera works its magic. Kevin explains, ‘It was great because it also meant that I could get up, run over to a camera really quickly, and make sure it was still running.

‘The fact that it's safe, comfortable, warm, dry, that you can reasonably expect it's not going to rain on you overnight… that's really special. It's an experience that's hard to give people and it requires being in exactly the right kind of place. It exceeded all of our expectations that way. We spent most of our nights there sleeping outside.’ 

Coming from the northern hemisphere, Kevin delighted in sights he can’t see back home in the US, such as the Magellanic clouds. These are two dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. (Dwarf galaxes contain ‘just a few’ billion stars compared to their larger cousins, like the Milky Way Galaxy, which can contain hundreds of billions of stars, according to the European Space Agency). 

The Southern Cross is another constellation only visible in the southern hemisphere, as well as Alpha and Beta Centauri. ‘Alpha Centauri is the closest of our neighbouring stars, and it's one of the brightest stars in the night sky,’ says Kevin. 

‘It’s just below our horizon in the summertime when we’re looking at the core of the Milky Way. But it’s a prominent feature of pretty much all of the Milky Way shots I got from Namibia.’

Antares, a bright red star often confused with Mars, was also visible. ‘It’s a great marker for where the core is going to be because the core follows immediately behind it,’ Kevin tells me. 

Near Antares is the complex Rho Ophiuchi, which – despite being visible in the north – Kevin was able to capture with more detail than usual. 

The Rho Ophiuchi complex is what he calls a ‘stellar nursery’ and lies 460 light years away. ‘It’s a place where new stars are being born. That means there’s a ton of gas out there. All kinds of thick heavy clouds that are full of molecules. Because you have the beginning of stellar formation, you have fire – which means you have light. So, you have all this light bouncing of nearby clouds, creating a lot of visible light if you expose for long enough and are in a dark enough place to see it. I found that we got all kinds of detail of it in a lot of our images – more than I'm accustomed to getting,’ says Kevin. 

Kevin delivers one fascinating fact after another as our conversation progresses, but in between all that, he ponders the metaphysical aspects of stargazing. He describes the Milky Way as both ‘a timepiece and a calendar if you know how to read it’.

It’s a portal, too, in many ways: ‘You’re looking out across space and time; experiencing it in scales that are hard to imagine. The core of the galaxy is give or take 30,000 light years away, which means that the light in our photographs is 30,000 years old. On the night that I captured it, it had been travelling across space for 30,000 years at the speed of light in order to reach us. So, that light you're capturing, it's older than human civilisation.

‘It's much like any other kind of transcendent moment in nature. If you give yourself that opportunity to slow down, observe and experience it, to feel what it is to be a very, very, very small creature on this little planet, in this little corner of the universe, and to look out and realise how much more there is out there, how much universe goes on beyond your own ability to perceive it… It changes people. It really does.’ 

Finally, I ask Kevin about a French expression he introduced me to back in Namibia. L'appel du vide meaning ‘the call of the void’. ‘It's meant to reference when people see a big drop off,’ he says; that strange and inexplicable impulse to jump when you’re standing at the edge of a cliff. 

I ask him if the call comes exclusively over canyons, or if it’s something he might have felt stargazing in Namibia. ‘It’s definitely the same feeling,’ Kevin remarks. ‘Like, “Oh my god, what if I could fall into this infinite expanse?” You gain this appreciation that the Earth is holding onto you.’