Perseid Pic

Okay, last night I tried my first meteor pictures. Here is the best one I got.

The meteor is in the lower left corner. Note there is some green in here. I am not sure if that is real or not since I was asleep at the time.

Yep, I am so lazy I take pictures in my sleep. I set up my Canon Digital Rebel XTi with a 35mm lens operating at f/2.8 and ISO 800 out on my roof about 1:15am. I recently purchased an inexpensive programmable remote timer. I set it up to just keep taking 15 second exposures until the battery ran out (I knew the battery would run out before the memory card filled up). I pointed the camera to the northeast, climbed back in through the window and went back to sleep. I woke up about 5:30am and retrieved the camera to find it got 388 shots before the battery died.

I am making these 388 shots into a time lapse movie. I am not quite happy with it yet. Still trying to get the timing reasonable on it. There are other meteors (haven't done a count yet) but this is the brightest. I will post the movie later today or tonight when I get it finished.

So I consider it a moderate success from my initial review of the images. Obviously, I would like to get somewhere darker to do this. Since my camera has an APS-C sensor, the 35mm lens really acts like a 56mm lens on a full frame camera. That means I don't get as large a chunk of sky as I want. I could have tried my 18-55mm zoom that came with the camera, but it only goes down to f/4 so I would have missed the fainter meteors. So my next priority is a wider field lens! I would love to get a fisheye lens and do this!

The other thing I wast to do is get an external power supply so I am not limited by the battery. I have batteries for my telescope, but I may need a cord/transformer to really make it work. My memory card holds about 1000 photos, so I can go over twice as long as I did.

Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.