A composite of the Perseid meteor shower on the night of August 11/12, 2017, taken from home in rural Alberta, over a wheatfield with the waning Moon rising at right. The radiant point in Perseus is just left of centre. M31 is right of centre; Cassiopeia is above centre. As usual, there is one imposter satellite above the radiant looking like a meteor moving in the right direction, but with a uniform trail that gives it away as a satellite. The Moon was a waning gibbous this night. This is a composite of 19 images: one for the foreground and sky and one meteor, and 18 for other meteors layered in using Lighten mode and masked to reveal just the meteors. The camera was not tracking the sky, so the meteor layers were all rotated around Polaris at upper left to place the meteor for that frame in the correct position in the sky relative to the background stars where it appeared, to preserve the perspective of the radiant point in Perseus, which rose through the night. The images were taken from a full set of 700 images taken over 4.5 hours from 10:42 pm to 3:04 am. The base image is from 11:46 pm just after moonrise. Each exposure was 20 seconds at f/2.5 with the Rokinon 14mm lens and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 3200. I used the camera’s internal Interval Timer set to 22 second interval for shots as quickly as possible with a mimumum of “dark time.”
A bright bolide meteor and “smoke” trail south of the southern Milky Way as Crux and the Pointers rise in the east on a clear Australian night. Jupiter is the bright object at left. This is a stack of 8 x 45-second untracked exposures for the ground, mean combined to smooth noise, and one 45-second exposure for the stars and main bolide trail. The yellow ion train was added in with another exposure taken a couple of minutes later as the train began to blow away from the meteor path. That layer is masked to reveal just the train. All frames taken as part of a 500-frame time-lapse sequence of the Milky Way rising.
A lone Geminid meteor on the peak night of the Geminid meteor shower, December 13, 2016, competing against the bright Full Moon and a perigee Moon at that, so it was a very bright night but very clear. And cold - about -15° C. This is one frame of 1500 shot this night, hoping to capture more meteors. But only 2 frames had a decent meteor. 3 others had fainter meteors or the usual meteor right at the edge of the frame. Gemini is at the very top left and Orion at upper right. Sirius is just rising; Procyon is above it. The Moon is just edging off the frame. All exposures were 10 seconds at f/2.8 and ISO 500 with the Nikon D750 and Sigma 20mm Art lens. Shot from home in southern Alberta - was I going to drive someplace and sit in a cold car for 6 hours? Not on your life!
