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Perseid fever...
Aug. 12th, 2009 05:23 amThis is supposed to be the best night to be watching the Perseid meteor shower, so I set the alarm for 3 am and got up and out to see what I could see.
It was a pleasantly cool night to be out, but the half-moon pretty much put a damper on things, as all the light in the sky made it impossible to see any but the brightest meteors.
In my eternal quest for a nice photo, I managed to RTFM and set my camera to shoot at ISO 1600, with an f/2.8 lens opening and a 15 second exposure.
I actually caught two meteors (and a few more didn't show up in images because their photons didn't adequately excite my camera's CCD sensors).
In the shot below, the meteor's streak is almost coincident with a line drawn between θLyr and a star named Sulafat, both part of the constellation Lyra. Those two stars, together with the brightest star in the constellation, Vega (the bright star along the right edge, about a quarter of the way down from the top), form an almost equilateral triangle. (If you go visit my Flickr account, the so-called "blind astronomy solver" has labeled a number of stars in the image (though not θLyr, for some reason).
The meteor caught in the next image is passing through the constellation Hercules, appearing to just graze the star Massym (also known as Misam). (More star information can be seen here).
Wow. It's almost time to get up, but I think I'll sleep in for a few hours.
Cheers...
It was a pleasantly cool night to be out, but the half-moon pretty much put a damper on things, as all the light in the sky made it impossible to see any but the brightest meteors.
In my eternal quest for a nice photo, I managed to RTFM and set my camera to shoot at ISO 1600, with an f/2.8 lens opening and a 15 second exposure.
I actually caught two meteors (and a few more didn't show up in images because their photons didn't adequately excite my camera's CCD sensors).
In the shot below, the meteor's streak is almost coincident with a line drawn between θLyr and a star named Sulafat, both part of the constellation Lyra. Those two stars, together with the brightest star in the constellation, Vega (the bright star along the right edge, about a quarter of the way down from the top), form an almost equilateral triangle. (If you go visit my Flickr account, the so-called "blind astronomy solver" has labeled a number of stars in the image (though not θLyr, for some reason).
The meteor caught in the next image is passing through the constellation Hercules, appearing to just graze the star Massym (also known as Misam). (More star information can be seen here).
Wow. It's almost time to get up, but I think I'll sleep in for a few hours.
Cheers...
