Meteor shower tonight 12.08.2007

[jim_karthauser]

Tonight will be one of the best meteor showers until 2015, so I'll be out with

my camera to get a piece of the action tomorrow morning at 2am. I've had

trouble before with condensation on the glass, does anyone have any ideas to

keep it warm? I've heard about using hot pads, but I haven't got anything like

that, just household things. Does anyone have any other helpful hints that I

need to bear in mind?

 

Thanks in Advance

 

Jim

 

Link to info-

http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/article1869865.ece

[JDMvW]

Let's hope that the shower lives up to its report. I've been out the last two nights hoping to catch some meteors, but not a streak. The best time is supposed to be before dawn Monday 13th August 2007.

 

For more see: http://www.earthsky.org

[susanm]

I'm planning on taking my kids out to Palm Springs tonight hoping to get a good view. I've never done any night/star photography---what's the best way to capture it? I won't have a SLR, but a digital camera with SLR-like settings.

[jennifer_durand]

Looking forward to seeing whatever you get from your night out with the stars.

[JDMvW]

There are some remarkable night sky photos at this thread, and these may be helpful to meteor shooters too:

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00LwRG

[SCL]

FWIW I just came in from 1 hour's (midnight to 1 am) worth of shooting ...got lots of star pix in spite of the light clouds, but not a meteor (shooting star) in a one of them. Oh well....my wife will tell me at breakfast that I should have gone to bed instead of staying up for this foolish photography thing.

[jim_karthauser]

Yes,Steven, it was sparse! I was out for an hour and a half or so and only saw 15 meteors in total. Did some long exposures, some 15 minutes, no meteors in shot! My other half wasn't impressed when I dragged myself into bed at 4am, but at least I had a go...

 

Better luck next time?

[martin_howard1]

at least you had clear skies!

[jkmccarthy]

I was out in my backyard last night also trying to capture some (any!) of the Perseid meteors with my Nikon D200. From Los Angeles only the brightest were visible to the unaided eye, given the strong light pollution, but after reviewing my photographs this morning I thought I'd compare notes with others here:

 

(1) I'd selected the widest angle lens I had, in order to cover the largest fraction of the sky possible. In my case, this was an 18-70mm zoom set at 18mm focal length.

 

(2) For a given lens, the widest aperture admits the most light in order to have the best chance at capturing meteors, so this meant f/3.5.

 

(3) My night sky was least light polluted (darkest) straight overhead, so that's where I pointed the camera. Meteor showers have a "radiant" point (for the Perseids, this is in the constellation Perseus) from which the meteor paths originate if traced backward, but the meteors themselves can appear in almost any part of the sky.

 

(4) Light pollution and wide-open lens meant that the sky background level would saturate the CCD if I tried a long exposure (e.g., several minutes -- long enough to record star trails due to earth's rotation) at the highest ISO speeds. I ended up settling on 30sec exposures at ISO=400 ... less noise than 800 or 1600 ... as this showed stars fainter than I could see visually, and small very short star trails, and a sky background that was visible not too bright to overwhelm the stars.

 

(5) "Auto" white balance gave a dark steel gray sky, while "Sunlight" white balance (the Sun is a star, afterall) gave more realistic star colors BUT recorded the sky as glowing dull orange (probably true, due to light pollution from high and low pressure sodium lamp streetlights). I shot "JPG Fine + RAW", so can revisit the white balance after-the-fact.

 

End result ? There were several meteors I saw visually while the shutter was open that I did not see captured when reviewing the photos. My recollection is also that the several airplanes that flew overhead were brighter to me visually than their tracks in the digital pictures ... but it's meanwhile true that the digital camera recorded fainter stars than I could see visually.

 

I think the explanation is the 30sec time exposure: the stars moved several CCD pixels (about 5) in 30sec, so took ~6sec to cross a given pixel (or more taking the point spread function into account). But airplanes and meteors would cross a given pixel in a fraction of a second, putting the CCD digital camera at a disadvantage relative to what my eye saw of planes and meteors, compared to the stars.

 

So in hindsight, I think a faster ISO setting (or a prime lens with wider maximum aperture) would have given me better results. Keeping the sky background from getting too bright at higher ISO or faster aperture would require either shorter exposures or driving to a location a darker sky.

 

Does this agree with other people's experience ?

 

Thanks for your comments,

 

-- Jim<div></div>

[JDMvW]

It was a total bust here. Nothing visible earlier, and by the time (4AM-5AM) it was supposed to have got better, it clouded over here. Sob.

[chris_waller]

I'm in the UK and stood outside for an hour until 23.00 and saw only three meteors. I did see one huge flash on the Friday evening previous.

[James G. Dainis]

I gave up on those much ballyhooed meteor showers a long time ago. Most are too faint to see against the light pollution and most are only a quick half inch long, relatively speaking, in the sky. If you can see trees silhouetted against the sky, that is light pollution. Get on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic where there is no light pollution and you will see so many stars, usually hidden by light pollution, that you will have a hard time picking out the major constellations.

[m_j25]

I can't believe I missed it. I am so upset.