Chasing (falling) stars
Hi all and welcome to this weeks blog. Last weekend we were treated to one of the best meteor showers of the year with the peak of the Perseids. Remnants of the tail of Haleys comet that come from the part of the night sky that the constellation of Perseus resides, the meteorites themselves are mostly no bigger than a grain of sand, they nevertheless create quite the light show in the night sky.
I first ventured out Sunday night but was thwarted by a blanket of clouds above my chosen location, a ruined Dovecote near Bruton. I did however manage to collate the images into a cool timelapse below.
Timelpase showing the passing clouds that obscured my view of the night sky Sunday.
I got home at 3.30am tired and disappointed and grumbled my way to bed making sure I didnt tread on any sleeping cats in the house!
The following night was looking very promising with mostly clear skies forecast. However I had work the next day so would be unable to stay as long as I had the previous night. Armed with my ZF and my daughters Z6 which she was kindly letting me borrow for the night I decided to maximise my time out and headed a couple of minutes down the road to my trusty lone tree in a field that I have photographed many times over the past couple of years. I set both cameras up with intervelometers running, pointing at the tree and skies above and patiently stood back, obvserving the skies above me for signs of meteors. It wasnt long before I spotted my first one, streaking across the sky to my right! Typical! But I had my composition and I was sticking to it. At this point my phone pinged an alert. One of my Aurora apps had gone off claiming that the Northern lights were visible across the UK. Slightly confused, I checked the app itself and it was holding steady at around 65, meaning no sign of activity. This got me even more confused as looking to the north I could see no signs of any lights in the sky. Okay, I thought, I have two cameras, why not reposition one to the north and see what it captures? I moved the Z6 leaving the ZF with the Viltrox 16mm on doing its thing with Lonely Joe and took a test exposure with the newly positioned Z6. Well blow me down with a feather if the screen didnt fill up with pink hues when it had completed the first exposure! What are the odds of getting the Perseids peaking AND aurora activity on the same night?? Astronmical (pun intended!). I quickly set up what I thought was at least a half decent composition with a low hill in front of me and restarted the intervalometer. I then studied the sky above the hill and started to notice the columns of light dancing in the sky. It was really kicking off and for a few brief minutes all thoughts of Perseids were cast to the back of my mind as I took in the incredible display of colour and light that danced across the night sky above me! And just like that it was over. It barely lasted two minutes unlike the insane display we had earlier in the year but for just a few moments it had shone just as brightly! I let the camera run for a couple more minutes then looked to see what I had caught and was blown away by the colours and structures I was seeing on the back of the Z6.
The Aurora, shining brightly in the southern UK skies!
After the excitement of the lights I settled back to watching for metoers above Joe where my ZF was focused. They seemed fewer this year than previous ones but I did manage to capture a few in my composition. However, I forgot a lesson I had learned from the previous year to keep my exposures shorter, around 5-10 seconds and had the camera set up for 20 seconds with a lower ISO. This, in effect dilutes the light from the Perseids making them look fainter than they were and losing the fainter ones altogether! Next time I must remember this trick so I can capture more. I did manage to capture one meteor though that wasn’t even part of the Perseids. It came from a different direction and moved far more slowly than the zip along grains. It also burned up with a bright orange, almost golden glow and was by far my best capture of the night, especially with the milky way showing off to the right of the image too.
The interloper meteor shining almost golden in the night sky above Joe.
I finally packed up around 1am and went home in a much happier mood than the previous nights excursion. I once again failed to tread on a cat as I quietly made my way to bed and slept soundly for all of 4 hours before getting up for work!
Along with the exposure time mistake I made on the night I also fell victim to condensation on my Viltrox lens. I had been checking my 24-70mm lens on the Z6 and none showed up on that throughout the session but I guess because the Viltrox is mostly metal and the Nikon one is plastic it got colder quicker, hence the fogging. I was gutted as I lost about half the images from the night (160) because it just looked like thick fog. A lens warmer is now winging its way to me from Amazon! It did leave me with 168 images of Joe though and i decided to combine these into a star trail image rather than just bin all the ones without meteors, which is below and is quite possibly my favourite image of the night!
Well thats it folks. I hope you enjoyed my tale of two nights with a cricked neck and several failures and the odd success! Catch you in the next one!
