A composite depicting the Perseid meteor shower on the night of Wednesday, August 12, 2015 as shot from southern Alberta, Canada. The image takes in a wide swath of the north and eastern sky, including the radiant of the shower in Perseus at left of centre, near the Double Cluster visible as a clump of stars. All the Perseids can be traced back to this point. Also in the image: the summer Milky Way and, at left, a dim aurora in green and magenta that was barely visible to the eye but was picked up by the camera. The Andromeda Galaxy is at centre. The Pleiades is just on the horizon. Apart from some haze from forest fire smoke, it was a near perfect night: warm, dry, just a little wind to keep the bugs at bay, and no Moon. A perfect night for a meteor watch. This is a layered stack of 35 images recording three dozen meteors (most Perseids but also a couple of sporadics not aimed back to the radiant in Perseus, such as the bright one at far left). The 35 images were selected from 200 shot from 11 pm to 2:30 am that night, with most frames not picking up any meteors. This composite is from the 35 taken over the 3.5 hours that did record a meteor. Each exposure is 1 minute at f/2.8 with the 15mm full-frame fish-eye, on the Canon 5D MkII at ISO 3200 (a couple of the early shots in the sequence were at ISO 1600 for 2 minutes). The camera was tracking the sky on the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer tracker, so all images of the stars are aligned and registered out of the camera, with the meteors in their proper position relative to the stars and radiant. I masked out a couple of satellite and aircraft trails that were distracting, and took away from the point of illustrating the radiant of the meteor shower. The horizon, however, is from one image, taken early in the sequence. Some of the blue in the sky comes from one of the early shots taken in deep twilight but that contained a nice meteor. And I liked the blue it added. All stacking and processing with Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop.
The Perseid meteor shower from Tuesday, August 11, 2015, the night before the peak night, under moonless skies, shot from hom in southern Alberta. The camera is looking east, with the radiant point in Perseus at left in the northeast. The Milky Way runs from Perseus across the top into Cygnus. A dim aurora adds greens and magentas at left. This is a composite stack of 7 images with meteors from a sequence of 60, all taken with the 15mm full-frame fish-eye on the Canon 5D MkII, and tracking the sky to follow the stars. The ground is from one image, the first in the sequence.
The Perseid meteor shower on August 11, 2015, the night before peak night, taken from a canola field in southern Alberta. Some aurora lights the sky and some clouds are drifting through the scene. The Milky Way in Perseus and Cassiopeia rises in the northeast. The camera is looking toward the radiant of the meteor shower in Perseus. This is a composite stack of 10 images, out of a sequence of 160 shot in a sequence for a time-lapse or single-image stacking. The camera was the Canon 6D at ISO 3200, and the lens was the 14mm Rokinon at f/2.8, all exposures for 60 seconds but with the camera on a fixed tripod - so no tracking here. The ground - a canola field - comes from a mean-combine average of the 10 frames to smooth noise. The sky and one meteor is from one frame, one with the best aurora. To blend in the meteors from the other 9 frames taken at earlier and later times I rotated those frames manually around the celestial pole at top left (at Polaris) to place those skies in close to the correct position reletive to the base sky image. I then masked out all but the meteors in those additonal frames, so that they are close to their correct stellar position relative to the fixed background layer and to the radiant point of the shower in Perseus at centre frame. However, one or two meteors don’t seem to belong and may be sporadics. I cloned out a distracting aircraft and satellite.
