Martin Pfeiffer

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Martin Pfeiffer

Landscape & travel photographer, drone pilot and timelapse videograph Landscape and travel photographer

20/10/2024

Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, lies about 2.5 million light-years away and is the largest galaxy in our local group. It has a diameter of 220,000 light years and is therefore more than twice the size of our Milky Way, and contains an estimated one trillion stars. Looking at it, you’re seeing light that left the galaxy long before humans even existed.

The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the few galaxies visible to the naked eye from Earth. On a clear, dark night, it appears as a faint, hazy spot in the sky, but its actual size is even more impressive – spanning an area over six times wider than the full Moon.

For this image, I used a star tracker to keep my camera aligned with the night sky, allowing me to take 70 individual exposures that I later combined into a single, detailed photo. Without the tracker, the movement of the stars would blur the image, but with it, I could reveal the galaxy’s details and bright core.
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14/10/2024

Just after sunset tonight, the clouds finally parted, revealing a sight I’d been hoping for. From my terrace, I caught a glimpse of comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS above the city of Saint Gallen, its tail stretching out beside the silhouette of St. Gallen Cathedral.

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is a rare visitor that was first spotted on January 9, 2023, but soon became the third brightest comet in the last 100 years. With its glowing tail, formed when the sun’s heat vaporizes its icy core, it is only a short spectacle in our skies. Now, as it moves further away from the sun, the tail is beginning to fade, and soon it will disappear from the night sky. It will be at least 80,000 years before this comet passes by Earth again.
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13/10/2024

A few weeks ago, I went up to the Saxer Lücke in the Alpstein mountains to take this picture of the Milky Way from here. I’d had this picture in my head for 5 years, and finally the conditions were right in September.

It was incredibly windy, I was only on a small ledge and it went down very steep on all sides. So it didn‘t really feel safe. But it was absolutely worth it to spend the night up here.
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22/09/2024

It’s moments like these that constantly inspire me to discover new places, get into nature, and climb mountains. These are moments that belong uniquely to you, that no one else experiences in exactly the same way as you do, whose emotions can hardly be captured in a picture.

Here, I was camping on a mountain peak at 1’000m a.s.l. on the Norwegian island of Senja, right on the edge of a steep rock face. That night, the strong winds kept me awake, but at 3:30 a.m., I stepped out of my tent and was greeted by an magnificent view of the fjords, just as the Arctic sun began to rise in the north. It was an incredibly moving moment, and perhaps the most spectacular place I’ve ever spent the night.

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📷 Martin Pfeiffer
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18/09/2024

Last night’s partial lunar eclipse over the city of Saint Gallen, Switzerland, taken at 4.30 a.m. from my bedroom window with my 200mm telephoto lens.

A partial lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth moves between the Sun and the Moon, but only part of the Moon is covered by Earth’s shadow (the umbra). During this event, the Earth’s shadow slowly moves across the Moon’s surface, creating this mystic visual effect.

The shadow visible in this picture is the Earth’s umbra, or full shadow, while the rest of the Moon is subtly darkened by the penumbra, the lighter outer shadow.

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20/05/2024

The Northern Lights that I recently observed over Switzerland motivated me to develop this older image, taken in Iceland in October 2019. There was a strong storm blowing at over 100km/h and wind gusts of up to 170km/h as we barely made it to Skógafoss in our campervans.

As soon as we arrived, the sky began to glow green and the Northern Lights danced for hours over this iconic waterfall.

With temperatures hovering around freezing, we spent half the night lying on our stomachs on the frozen river, the spray from the waterfall splashing directly into our faces, to capture this impressive natural spectacle on camera.

It’s moments like these that motivate me to go out into nature again and again, even at inconvenient times and sometimes under difficult conditions, to show you the beauty of our planet.

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📷 Martin Pfeiffer
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🚐 Travelmates .kohl_photography
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12/05/2024

This Friday I was able to observe a very rare natural phenomenon for Switzerland directly from my terrace. One of the strongest geomagnetic storms since 2005 caused intense northern lights over the city of St. Gallen and colored the sky reddish-pink to green.

Normally, the Aurora Borealis is only visible in the polar regions, where the magnetic field of our planet is weaker and the charged particles of the solar wind reach the atmosphere and react with the air molecules. But strong eruptions on the sun sometimes through so much material towards the earth that more particles can pass through the magnetosphere, making the Northern Lights visible further away from the poles.

Nevertheless, it was overwhelming to be able to capture this phenomenon, which I had previously only been able to photograph on Iceland, in this intensity from home with my camera.

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16/10/2022

It's been a year and a half now since I had the opportunity to experience a volcanic eruption up close. Still one of the most breathtaking experiences of my life. Only a few meters away from the destructive lava flow, one realizes how unpredictable and yet admirable nature is.
In one week a new adventure starts for me in Iceland, and I am already looking forward to bring you the beauty of this landscape again.
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19/09/2018

Last weekend I was in the Swiss Alps and made this panorama above the Great Aletsch Glacier, the largest and longest glacier in the Alps (23 km long, 1.8 km wide, where its thickness was measured to be near 1 km).

The view of this giant is simply stunning. But global warming is affecting the glacier. As of 2016, since 1980 it lost 1.3 km of its length, since 1870 3.2 km, and lost also more than 30 m of its thickness.

In the background you can see the three well-known peaks Eiger (3967m), Mönch (4107m) and Jungfrau (4158m)

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The panorama was made with my DJI Mavic Air out of 25 single images and stitched together with PTGui. It has a resolution of over 177 Megapixel.

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Travel buddies: Nick Schmid Photography, Baggalude Fotokiste, Toubi Marti

07/05/2018

At the south-western corner of Cuba there is almost no light pollution except the small lights of the hotel in the background that illuminate the beautiful beach of Maria la Gorda. These conditions provide a breathtaking view of the Milky Way and its centre.
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Single shot: 14mm | f/2.8 | 15s | ISO 2500
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Adresse

Arnisee
Gurtnellen
6476

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http://www.martinpfeiffer.ch/

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