Geminid Meteor path. Slide film.

Two cameras, two and a half hours, 10 degrees below zero, standing in

the snow in the middle of the night. We must've seen about a hundred

meteors but the cameras only saw this one.

i'm actually going to have to disagree with you on this one. sorry to burst your bubble but i believe that is an airplane. notice the dotted line near the top, the closest the plane was to you. the spaces are closest here, as you go into the distance the dotte turns into a solid. it's possible that your aperture was to small to capture the meteors. maybe next time, try and taking many photos wide open. let me know if you disagree

That makes sense. The consistent spacing between the dots in the light path would be explained by the strobe lights on a jet. That would mean that we spent hours with two cameras and didn't get a single meteor. I'll try it again next year. Most of the advice I read on this site and others recomended f-8. We used f-8 & f-11.

I still like the picture. I just need to rename it.

Here are a few of the things I've learned over my 20 years of astrophotography--hope they help! Your mileage may vary... ;o)

I'd recommend using f/5.6 (on an f/2.8 lens). You'll get more of the fainter stars to show their trails. This is assuming that you're in a fairly dark sky location to begin with. I've had great results with exposures of up to 2 hours. This image shows a bit of light pollution near the horizon so a shorter exposure is probably best. Also, you'll notice that on the brighter trails there is a little "pimple" at the beginning of the trail, indicating that you probably bumped the tripod early on in the exposure. For meteor showers, I'd also recommend a wider angle lens to cover more sky and increase the likelihood of successful captures. For my Mamiya 645, I use a 45mm lens.