Annulus: Cissbury Ring Star Trails

November 2nd, 2021, brought one of those rare perfect nights for star trail photography—crystal-clear skies, no wind, and the moon had already set, leaving Cissbury Ring bathed in complete darkness except for the distant glow of Worthing's lights on the horizon. I'd been waiting for these conditions for weeks, knowing this ancient Iron Age hill fort would create the perfect foreground for capturing Earth's rotation against the stars.

Cissbury Ring is one of the largest hill forts in England, covering 65 acres atop the South Downs in West Sussex. Built around 300 BC during the Iron Age, it sits 184 metres above sea level, and even earlier, Neolithic people mined flint here around 4000 BC—some of the deepest flint mines ever discovered in Britain. This lone tree has become iconic at Cissbury, standing as a solitary sentinel where ancient peoples once gathered, and I positioned it carefully to anchor the composition against the swirling cosmos above.

I set up my Canon R5 with the ultra-wide Samyang 14mm lens, framing the tree beneath Polaris, the North Star. Star trail photography requires patience—I captured 203 separate 30-second exposures over 105 minutes as the temperature dropped and frost began forming on the grass. Each frame recorded the stars moving slightly, and later I stacked all 203 images to create these circular star trails—the annular pattern forms because Earth spins on its axis, making the stars appear to rotate around Polaris in the northern sky.

The technique reveals something our eyes can't see in real-time: the constant motion of our planet through space. Standing there on Cissbury Ring for nearly two hours in the November cold, watching the stars slowly arc across the sky while this 2,300-year-old hill fort stood silent around me, connected past and present in the most profound way. The distant lights of Worthing and the Sussex coast add that warm glow on the horizon, grounding the cosmic scale in familiar coastal landscape.

When you look at this photograph, I want you to feel that connection—standing atop an ancient Iron Age hill fort on the South Downs, watching 105 minutes of Earth's rotation condensed into circular star trails around the North Star, where Neolithic miners and Iron Age warriors once looked up at these same constellations over West Sussex.