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.
The summer Milky Way with a meteor streaking at centre as a bonus. An aurora to the north off frame is lighting the foreground with a green glow. Haze and forest fire smoke obscure the horizon. I shot this at the Battle Scene viewpoint at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, in southern Alberta. Sagittarius and the galactic centre is on the horizon at left of centre. Capricornus is amid the haze at left of centre. On the horizon are the Sweetgrass Hills in Montana. The Milk River winds below amid the sandstone formations that are home to historic First Nations petroglyphs. This is a single 30-second exposure with the Nikon D750 at ISO 3200 and Sigma 24mm Art lens at f/2, taken as part of a time-lapse sequence.
A lone Geminid meteor streaking away from Gemini, at centre, with Orion at upper right. Taken December 12, 2014, the night before the peak of the annual Geminid meteor shower. Taken from near Silver City New Mexico. Taken with the Canon 6D at ISO 3200, and the 14mm lens at f/2.8, for 40 seconds, as part of a 400-frame time-lapse sequence. But this was the only meteor caught!
