2015 Perseids

[Jeremy Perez]

Did anyone observe or grab some shots of the Perseids earlier in the week?

I drove a few miles outside town Thursday morning with my wife and daughter from about 1:00-2:30 AM (August 13 • 0800-0930Z). I counted 74 Perseids and another 24 sporadic meteors. About 10% of that wound up on any exposures and only 3 of them were decently bright. This is a stack of 11 shots at Sunset Crater National Monument.



If you have any reports or photos, please share—

 

[Kevin Rimcoski]

Ya, but mine came out like crap. I got one meteor, not even that bright, don't know how to stack as well as you yet.



Going to tweak this one a bit more though

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[Dan Robinson]

Saw lots of nice Perseids, but had horrible luck with four right-in-the-middle-of-frame fireballs happening in the one-second gap in between the 13-second exposures. Here is my stack of the night with 3 faintly exposed meteors. I only stayed out for 2 hours due to having too much work to do.

 

[Jeremy Perez]

@Kevin Rimcoski
It looks like you've got a pretty dark sky at that location—how far outside Tucson did you need to get? So many times I wind up with zero or the thinnest hairline to show for a meteor shower.

@Dan Robinson
I had the punishing idea of running in-camera noise reduction to make processing easier later, so I had 13 seconds on/15 seconds off. I intentionally turned and looked at the other half of the sky during the down time segments so I wouldn't experience grief at what was being missed. :-/

I kept wondering whether I should have turned 180 degrees and gone for the central Milky Way shot like you both did—especially after multiple bright ones were tracing long skid marks down the Great Rift. But figured soon as I switched, the radiant would go nuts with bolides.

 

[Kevin Rimcoski]

Dan I had that same issue. The big ones were right out of frame all night. Or right in the spot I was shooting prior. I decided to just shoot one area and hope for the best

Jeremy, I only went out about 20 minutes. Marsh station road. Not the darkest location either. Empirita and south a little, or sonoita both would have been darker

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[Ben_Jacobi]

I had the privilege to photograph the meteor shower from the Lighthouse in Palo Duro Canyon. A photographer friend and I got special permission to camp overnight at the Lighthouse to photograph the Perseid meteor shower. This image is a stacked composite of 15 separate photos over the course of a few hours. It really was an amazing sight. Though I gotta say I was a little disappointed by the total number of meteors we saw that night it was still a very memorable experience for me. See the image better here: http://goo.gl/vL9xmy

 

[Marc R. O'Leary]

I was mostly clouded out, but scored one of my most vivid Perseids:

 

[kevin-palmer]

I love meteor showers and when the moon phase is favorable I usually attempt to shoot them from somewhere really dark. Last week I went up to Michigan's Upper Peninsula for 3 nights. The 1st night (the 11th) I was near Copper Harbor and that had to be the darkest place I have ever seen in the Midwest. Many meteors and the aurora were visible.


Two for One by Kevin Palmer, on Flickr


Meteor at Hunter's Point by Kevin Palmer, on Flickr

The 2nd night (the peak of the shower) was mostly clouded out. The UP is actually one of the cloudiest places in the country so I should be happy with 2 clear nights out of 3. The 3rd night I went backpacking into the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness. From my campsite on Lake Superior my camera took over 500 pictures while I slept. A distant lightning storm somewhere in Canada lit up the horizon most of the night.


The Brightest Perseid by Kevin Palmer, on Flickr


Lightning and Meteor by Kevin Palmer, on Flickr

Overall it was a pretty good trip except that my laptop quit working which is why it took me so long to edit these. You can see more pictures from Michigan here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevin-palmer/

 

[Marc R. O'Leary]

Great shots Kevin! Really nice!