Tips and Tricks: Photographing the Perseid Meteor Shower by Fred Bruenjes

Submitted by AstroPhoto Insight on Tue, 08/11/2009 - 18:27.
This article was original published in the June 2006 issue of AstroPhoto Insight™ Magazine. No portion of this article may be copied, reposted, duplicated or otherwise used without the express written approval of the author and AstroPhoto Insight. © 2006 Professional Insight

There are about 160 Perseids in the picture below, captured on the nights of August 11th and 12th, 2005. Over a total of ten hours, I took 3,555 JPEG exposures, each 10 seconds at F/1.8 ISO3200 on my Canon 1D Mark II and Sigma 20mm F/1.8 lens. This setup captures meteors fainter than what I can see with the naked eye in mag 4.5-5.0 skies, and bags enough satellites and aircraft to drive me nuts (I left those out of the composite).


Click on the image to see the full size image.

The 2007 Perseids (253 meteors captured)

I've found that if you want more faint meteors, you have to get a wider aperture lens and use shorter exposures. But if you want more bright meteors, you need to run your camera continuously for several nights around the maximum, as bright meteors are rare.

The prospect of meticulously searching for meteors in over 3,500 images was an intimidating task to say the least, so I had to write a simple software program to help me find the meteors in the raw images. The app wrote the contrast stretched black and white difference of two sequential JPEG images out to a new image file for quick reviewing.

This difference image then only needed about 2-3 seconds of inspection. Images with Perseid meteors were stacked in Photoshop using painted masks (because of changing sky brightness through the night it's not possible to do a full frame 'lighten' or add).

The background star field took way more work than I had anticipated. Ten second exposures were too short to adequately show the Milky Way (duh), so I had to go back and take a stack of eleven 30 second F/3.2 exposures on a later night. Then a nasty light pollution gradient required some masked levels work in Photoshop to remove. After all that effort to bring out faint stars I couldn't discern any familiar bright stars (ugh), so I stacked in a blurred short exposure to emphasize the familiar constellations. See for example the 'W' of Cassiopeia at center. I'm still not totally happy with the background, as I couldn't do anything about the lens induced purple fringing around many stars. But all in all I'm very happy with the end product.

Fred Bruenjes website: http://www.moonglow.net/ccd/