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Perseids

CuriousMike

CuriousMike

Diamond Member
Anyone plan on doing some meteor watching?
They peak this Wednesday night - on the Pacific coast, it looks like 11pm-2a.m. should be a good time to look North-NorthEast ( around Ursa Major)

Hard to escape light pollution here in bay area, but I plan on driving an hour to get as dark as I can and take some photos.
 
If weather is clear, yes. Trying to convince my buddy to suck up the drive to Guanella Pass. If not, we'll head an hour East to somewhere dark in the plains.
 
I almost never get to see these since the San Antonio, Texas area is almost always clouded over at night in the summer. It's great, it keeps all that wonderful daytime heating in at night.
 
It's looking like cloudy ( but not completely clouded over ) weather in the Bay Area for Wednesday night / Thursday morning. I'm hoping for the best.
 
Getting the gear ready.
Luc is my D610 - he'll wear the 14mm @f/2.8 and is the main guy responsible for catching a meteor.

Henri is my D5200 - we'll be playing with him. I'm going to try the 70-200 @f/4 and see if I can capture Andromeda -- even a smidge. Then poke around for other nebula and see if I get anything. Then, I'll put the 24-120@f/4, see what 24@f4 does. Maybe the 50 @ f/1.8 and see what happens there.

Pierra is the Oly, and he's relegated to backstop ( and the dollar store tripod.) I don't really know what to expect from the m43 sensor with kit lens, but I'll point him to the stars in a slightly different section than Luc, and see what we get.

lestarwars.jpg
 
So i've never shot a meteor shower before.... what's the strategy? Go wide or go home? Looks like you're going for both, Mike? I'm traveling in the Bay Area again and only brought my 18-140 and a 35mm to keep it light.... i assume my best bet will be 18mm[28mm]?
 
Go wide and be wide open.
If you find them concentrating in an area, you could definitely put the 35 on and open it up. Try keeping the ISO at 1600 and your shutter speeds at 500/28 =no greater than 15 seconds for the 18 or 500/35*1.5 = 10 seconds for the 35.

You'll want to be pointing North - the perseids will emmit from the North-East, but the longest trails will be 90' to the emission point. With that said, they can come from anywhere really.

Edit: I'm no expert on this, I've just been doing some googling on this recently. 🙂
 
CuriousMike said:
Go wide and be wide open.
If you find them concentrating in an area, you could definitely put the 35 on and open it up. Try keeping the ISO at 1600 and your shutter speeds at 500/28 =no greater than 15 seconds for the 18 or 500/35*1.5 = 10 seconds for the 35.

You'll want to be pointing North - the perseids will emmit from the North-East, but the longest trails will be 90' to the emission point. With that said, they can come from anywhere really.

Edit: I'm no expert on this, I've just been doing some googling on this recently. 🙂
Click to expand...

Where are you going to be? Not sure if the hills behind Milpitas or at Lick would be far enough away or not and give me good enough visibility..... :hmm:
 
I'm driving down to King City - I'm going dark... it's a good 2 hour drive from Fremont, but I don't do this often and I'm going big. Honestly, the meteors are 66% of the reason I'm going, but I also want another shot at a good Milky Way photo and this promises to be a dark night and good time of the season.

Lick is good- not great.

I'm planning on leaving Fremont no later than 8pm and shooting until 2 a.m. ( peak is supposedly at 1 a.m. ) - if you're interested in joining me, shoot me a PM.

To the east of King City
2015-08-12%2013_04_49-Dark%20Sky%20Finder.jpg
 
CuriousMike said:
Pierra is the Oly, and he's relegated to backstop ( and the dollar store tripod.) I don't really know what to expect from the m43 sensor with kit lens, but I'll point him to the stars in a slightly different section than Luc, and see what we get.

lestarwars.jpg
Click to expand...

What Oly is that? I have an EM10 with a 12mm/2.0 lens and might give it a shot tonight (I'm off tomorrow).
 
carlton_fritz said:
I think it should be named the Bigfoot shower cause you are lucky if you see anything.
Click to expand...

EOM joined me for quite the trip last night. We drove about 2.5 hours to get to a little dark nub shown in my map above.

We shot from 10:45pm until 2:58am.

We did not see the expected 100 meteors/hour, but I'd say at the best we were seeing 50/hour.

You'd often see clumps of 2-3 right after each other.

I personally saw 5-6 "Holy Shit!" objects and I know I heard EOM throw out a similar "Holy Cows!".

I think we both saw at least one bus go thru the air.

I have no idea if I caught anything on the sensor as I was always looking *not* where my camera was pointed.

Today is going to be a long day at work (zzz) ... i'll pound thru the images I took tonight with hopes of a capture.
 
CuriousMike said:
EOM joined me for quite the trip last night. We drove about 2.5 hours to get to a little dark nub shown in my map above.

We shot from 10:45pm until 2:58am.

We did not see the expected 100 meteors/hour, but I'd say at the best we were seeing 50/hour.

You'd often see clumps of 2-3 right after each other.

I personally saw 5-6 "Holy Shit!" objects and I know I heard EOM throw out a similar "Holy Cows!".

I think we both saw at least one bus go thru the air.

I have no idea if I caught anything on the sensor as I was always looking *not* where my camera was pointed.

Today is going to be a long day at work (zzz) ... i'll pound thru the images I took tonight with hopes of a capture.
Click to expand...
Clear skies forecast for last night. I went outside and watched the clouds roll in.
 
I totally forgot about these till it was like 4am so I went out for maybe half an hour to take pics to see if I'd get lucky, then I set camera on time lapse mode at home but given how late it was there was not much night sky left as it was starting to get brighter out.

But while I was out there I did notice there were northern lights that were invisible to the naked eye.



And I did get lucky with this one:



I saw one big one like that while I was out, it was so surreal to see. It left a trail and everything.

I also got very lucky that it was a clear sky. This is our rain season, so it's 1 in a million chance to actually get a clear sky here when there's a celestial event happening.

I was hoping to do a longer time lapse tonight but it's pouring rain now so it will probably be cloudy all night. I start night shifts tonight so time lapse from inside the house will now be my only way to get any.
 
Yeah those caught me by surprise, I was taking a pic of the big dipper and they showed up in the picture but could not see with naked eye, I could slightly make out that it was brighter but that's about it.



The orange is a street light, that's when I decided to go for a drive and find a spot with less lights. So fun to play with a camera in the night sky though, catch so much that you don't really see with naked eye. Our period of clear skies has ended though, back to rain. Was hoping to set up a full night time lapse from a window while I'm at work on night shift. Not sure if the battery would last though, after about 3 hours it was almost dead, though it was not fully charged either. I'd probably want to get a battery grip or external AC power pack (is there such thing?) for these type of long time lapses.
 
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