Copyright ©2016 Deborah M. Zajac. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
I went out Friday night/Saturday morning star gazing hoping to photograph a meteor or two of the Perseid meteor shower. The Perseid Meteor shower is an annual event occurring from mid July to mid August as the Earth crosses the orbital path of Comet Swift-Tuttle; the parent of the Perseid meteor shower. Debris from the comet litters its orbital path, but we don’t get into the dense part of it until the first week of August. It’s this debris that slams into Earth’s upper atmosphere at 130,000 mile per hour lighting up the night sky with streaking Perseid meteors.
This year was to be particularly good for viewing more meteors because of our position in the debris path.
I saw a few really great meteors with wonderful balls of fire streaking through the sky, but the best image I made in 4 hours of sky watching was of this little meteor with some red at the head and a green tail. It’s a first time I’ve photographed the green tail.
There’s some of the Milky Way in there too, but faint, but there were oh, so many stars!
It was a wonderful night for star gazing.
Nikon Df| Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G @ f/2.8| ISO 1600| 26s single frame| Delkin Digital Film|PS CC 2015.5
Source-Earthsky.org
more to come…
Circadianreflections Blog 
Brilliant capture Deb!! and great video too!
Thank you very much Hana!
So cool, Deborah! Love this song, too.
Thank you so much Melissa!
Neat! Thanks for sharing your knowledge of the skies, your 4 hour sky-gazing experience and your super-cool meteor photo. Sometimes debris is pretty. 🙂
Thank you so much Myriam!
Fantastic capture Deborah!
This is a wonderful image! I have photographed stars but not star trails … this image inspires me to try!
Woops … talking about the previous image although this is great too. I went out for the meteor shower and caught some too but only posted on FB. I can’t wait for the next shower … I’m hooked!
🙂 It’s is catchy isn’t it. I totally get that. Thanks Denise!
Thank you so much Denise! You can do it! I look forward to seeing your first of many star trail images. 🙂
Another impressive one! Slept through the whole thing *sigh*
Such a gorgeous photo! I love this
Thank you so much Lynn! xx
Just breath taking
xx thank you!
xxx
Unfortunately we were under cloudy skies so no meteor showers for us but you got a great capture!! I can’t imagine the patience it took to get this photo!
I’m sorry you had cloud cover this year, but I can relate! I’ve been foiled by weather and clouds more times than I care to remember.
Regarding patience…I had all the patience in the world. I set up my camera to shoot every 2 seconds with my Intervalometer all night so, all I had to do was watch the sky and make sure my gear worked as it should, and change the battery before it ran dry. 🙂
Thank you so much for looking and for the comment! Hope you’re feeling much, much better!
Oh, of course! It never occurred to me to set up the camera to shoot automatically at regular intervals!!
You posted one meteor,but any idea of how many you were actually able to capture? I’m sure you have hundreds and hundreds of photos to go through!!
I only caught 3 meteors on film, and shot just under 300 images.
The meteors were over my head, or outside of my frame. I now think if I had used my Fisheye I may have caught a few more. Next year if I have clear skies, and the opportunity I will try it.
Many higher end cameras have built-in intervalometers; mine do, but for the life of me without the manual I can’t get it to work. I bought an external one. Once I figured out how to read the directions, which were harder to understand than actually setting up the timer shooting continuously has been fairly easy.
I read this with so much relief!! It seems I’m not the only one baffled by some of the features that come with our devices!!
Once upon a time there were user manuals that were actually somewhat user friendly!
LOL! No, you’re not alone.
I was in a hard place for a time. I didn’t want to carry my camera’s manual everywhere just to be able to read it to set up my intervalometer and trying to read it in the dark…no thanks! And, I couldn’t understand the directions and diagrams on the external intervalometers pamphlet! All of 2 pages of instructions. Thankfully, He-Man is fluent in convoluted electronic instructions and had it figured out in seconds, and showed me how to set it up.
My Lumix FZ200 user’s manual is online and not worth the effort to download the few pages. There’s simply not enough information there to really be of use! Thank God for online forums, and YouTube! 🙂
I was so proud of myself Friday night. The friend I was shooting with asked me how to troubleshoot his intervalometer/camera b/c it wasn’t shooting continuously, and I solved the problem!! I gave myself a little squeal of triumph for that. 🙂
Solving someone else’s problem and looking like a hero is outright awesome!! Squeal was earned 🙂
🙂 Thanks! It sure felt good helping instead of being helped with a gadget.
I see the red and green! Very interesting. I love it, Deborah 😊.
Thank you so much Pam! I’m so glad you can see the colors! 🙂
Good shot Deborah. I can’t see red/green in poor lighting conditions so I can’t see the green tail but I do see the tail. 7 of us went up to Nicasio Reservoir area last Thursday/Friday to shoot (parking then setting up took us til 2 a.m.) then we shot til after 4 a.m. and I only got 2 shots but we had several sightings. It was pretty cool but the howling coyotes made some a bit nervous.
Thank you Gordon!
I’ve been leaning toward changing my blog theme page since my images are small in this layout lately…something changed recently with this theme. 😦 In my preview there’s a nice big image, but once posted it’s much smaller.
Anyway, I didn’t see the predicted 100+ per hour meteors either, but did see some pretty good ones. Unfortunately, most didn’t make it to my film.
There were about 80 people star gazing where I was. Mostly were just looking and had smartphone. I only saw 3 tripods with cameras up and one of those was my own! I was surprised there were no telescopes. I wonder where those people went? 🙂
Funny you should mention Coyotes. I didn’t hear any, but did have this song in my head all night.
Looking forward to seeing the images from your night of star gazing.
Thanks for sharing this photo Deborah. It’s a beautiful phenomenon.
Thank you so much Dan!