Shooting the Perseid Meteor Shower

Three Meteorites Burn Up in the Upper Atmosphere Over Western Pennsylvania

I couldn’t believe our luck. It was the first time in years that the Perseid Meteor Shower peak period has lined up with a completely moonless sky…and the forecast called for clear skies. The latter is unheard of in Western Pennsylvania! Armed with the advantageous weather forecast, my friends and I headed North up to Kennerdell, PA for a campfire/cookout/star-watching filled night.

We headed up to the Kennerdell Overlook around midnight. It was incredibly dark out with the complete lack of moonlight (you could plainly see the Milky Way overhead, which was incredible), and if it wasn’t for the faint glow of Oil City to the North, we wouldn’t have been able to see anything at the overlook.

The light pollution situation in Kennerdell - Bortle 4

Setting up the cameras and focusing on the stars was more of a challenge than I anticipated it would be, but after about 10 minutes I was in focus and starting to run my intervalometer program. I was set to take 5-second exposures (any more and the stars would start to trail at the focal length I was using) with a 1-second delay between exposures. We saw well over 100 meteorites that night, some with incredible trails. I managed to catch a number of them with my camera, but unfortunately with the cool temps my lens started to accumulate dew on the front element, which rendered a large number of my shots worthless (I have already invested in a dew-heater strap and battery). Still, I captured a large number of good images up to the point that we started to have fog fill the valley below us. I turned the images into a timelapse and it turned out much better than I anticipated…disregard the quick sunset at Moraine…I don’t know how that got in there:

After coming home with all these star images, I decided to try to stack a few of them in Photoshop to see if I could bring out the Milky Way, but I failed miserably! Fortunately, a good friend stepped in and introduced me to the fascinating hobby of astrophotography (thanks Fixie…another expensive hobby is exactly what I needed!). He also introduced me to Sequater, which very easily allowed me to stack all my Milky Way images together into a noise-reduced TIFF that I was able to bring into Photoshop and stretch the image to reveal the Milky Way, the North American Nebula, the Pelican Nebula, and my personal favorite object…the Andromeda Galaxy:

The Cygnus Region of the Milky Way, including the Andromeda Galaxy on the right side of the frame.

I am absolutely floored at the level of detail you can bring out of the night sky with just a regular DSLR camera. I think I’m hooked on astrophotography, I cannot wait to dive in! Look for more photos of deep space objects in the future!