A composite of the Perseid meteors over Dinosaur Provincial Park on the night of August 12/13, 2017. A faint aurora is on the northern horizon at left. The meteors are accumulated over 3 hours of time –– recording 14 meteors extracted from a total of 645 images. One meteor obligingly appeared at centre that was particularly bright and left a long-lasting “smoke” train. The Double Cluster in Perseus is the diffuse spot at centre near the radiant. This is a composite of a single image for the ground and sky taken as the start of the sequence, layered with 14 other images of meteors taken over 3 hours, masked to reveal just the meteor. The camera was on a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Mini tracking device to follow the sky, so the stars in each frame remained in alignment throughout the 3 hours of shooting. So the meteors are in their accurate places in the sky relative to the background sky, retaining the effect of the radiant point in Perseus at centre. However, the composite is a bit of a cheat in that the waning Moon rose about 30 minutes after the sequence of 645 frames started, brighening the sky a lot. So most of the meteor images had to be colour adjusted to make them blend into the “start-of-the-night” dark sky background well. The shower was not so active that this many meteors were visible during the brief hour or so of dark sky this night before moonrise. So the image is not a realistic depiction of the night, but serves as an illustration of the shower radiant over a scenic landscape with the aurora a bonus. Each image was 15 seconds at f/2.2 with the Sigma 20mm Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 3200.
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.
