The Geeky Atheist

Last night as many of you know was the peak of the Perseids. I had driven up into the mountains on Monday night as well, but left my tripod mount back at the house. I set back out again last night with all of my gear in tow. The results were spectacular. After my comments and pictures, I'll give a few tips that I didn't read anywhere else on how to best set up your camera to capture meteors.

The view from up at roughly 10k feet is absolutely spectacular. Here's a 30 second exposure of my view of Santa Fe. According to another observer, the lights at the very edge of the horizon is actually the start of Albuquerque. I believe that's true because between Santa Fe and Albuquerque is pretty much nothing.

You'll probably have to click to enlarge to see it. The boxes help guide you to it. The full size image is available here

Full size image

Full size image

I had a great time, but photographing meteors can be tricky. Here's some tips to ensure a few exposures:

1. Use a tripod. A must for anything nearing a 1 second exposure, let alone 30 seconds.
2. Either have a cable release, IR remote, or set your camera to shoot delayed on a timer. The pressure from you hitting the shutter button will nudge your camera causing a shake. You need to have the exposure start when you're not touching the camera.
3. Long exposures are great, but at a low ISO setting (ie, 200) the meteors won't register. I experimented with ISO 1600 and 2500 on these exposures. I was still able to do 30 second exposures without things being blown out.
4. Snap lots of pictures.
5. Pick a spot in the sky and try for 5-10 minutes. Don't rotate between every shot.
6. When sorting through the images, you can compare two shots of the same area of sky by using the arrow keys back and forth. This helps spot the faint ones.
7. Don't use built-in noise reduction. Even software noise reduction really affects the quality of the streaks.

Lastly, don't get too frustrated. As we all know, karma plays a large role in this, and obviously my karma is low. Nearing 2am, I told myself, "Last picture" about 4 times, and then finally started taking things down. By the time I had my tripod fully packed up, I had seen 3 bright meteors. That's really frustrating when you know you didn't capture any big ones in your exposures.

But then I realized, this was my first time, and I still loved it. Anyone else have any good exposures?