Perseid Meteor Shower 2015

Comet Swift-Tuttle only passes the earth and circles the sun once every 133 years, but the earth passes through its trail of dust every year.  The debris field is large, so Perseid meteors may be seen on nights from July 17 through August 24.  The earth passes through the most dense portion of the comet's dust trail on the night of August 12-13, so that is when the peak, or maximum hourly rate of meteors, is seen.

On any given night, the sun sets as your position on the earth rotates away from the sun, then around midnight you rotate to a point directly opposite the sun. As the earth also moves in its orbit around the sun, your position on the earth is just starting to rotate to the side of the earth leading its movement through space, which collides with more debris. So meteor rates go up starting at midnight. At dawn you're approximately in the middle of the face of the earth as it flies through space, so meteor rates continue to climb slightly towards dawn. So the best bet in the evening is after midnight, in the last hours of darkness before the dawn's oncoming light brightens the sky.

This year I pursued the Perseids on the mornings of August 9, 11, 12 and 13. The best viewing was on the peak morning of the 13th, as expected. The composite photo above shows many of the meteors that my camera picked up over the course of nearly four hours.

I also assembled a time-lapse video that condenses several hours of meteor activity into seconds of video. You can see it on Vimeo here:


Perseid Meteor Shower 2015 from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Not everything that moves in the video are meteors; the meteors are the brief streaks of light, the slower ones are airplanes.  As you see the Milky Way and stars move, that is from the rotation of the earth. You can also see smoke from forest fires.

According to Wikipedia, Comet Swift–Tuttle has been described as "the single most dangerous object known to humanity". But don't worry, its next close encounter with the earth isn't expected until the year 4479. With a nucleus 26 kilometers across, if there were an impact, the force is estimated to be 27 times larger than the one which formed the Chicxulub crater beneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, which is believed to have caused the extinction the dinosaurs.

Doomsday preppers take note, you only have 2464 years to get ready!

The 2015 Perseid Meteor Shower is Underway

Perseid Meteor and Milky Way Over the Sierra Nevada, by Jeff Sullivan on 500px

Comet Swift-Tuttle only passes the earth and circles the sun once every 133 years, but the earth passes through its trail of dust every year.  The debris field is large, so Perseid meteors may be seen on nights from July 17 through August 24.  The earth passes through the most dense portion of the comet's dust trail on the night of August 12-13, so that is when the peak, or maximum hourly rate of meteors, will be seen.  The rates will also be high throughout the August 11 - 14 period, so you can look for Perseid meteors any or all nights this week.

Below is a video that I assembled in 2009 from several nights photographing the Perseid meteor shower.  It is a time-lapse video that condenses several hours of meteor activity into seconds of video:


Not everything that moves in the video are meteors; the meteors are the brief streaks of light, the slower ones are airplanes.  As you see the Milky Way and stars move, that is from the rotation of the earth.

You can also see haze that is smoke from forest fires that year.  I may have similar challenges this year due to the fires currently raging during California's drought.  Already the photo I captured above from last Saturday night is darker than usual, due to smoke from a wildfire.

Perseid Meteor Shower 2013

Perseid Meteor Shower August 2013:

Don't watch in this tiny window though... start it, then click "watch on YouTube" at the bottom, then the little gear icon to make it go 1080p or 720p HD, then click on the icon to make it go full screen.  Enjoy!

I have a copy on Vimeo as well in case you might like to compare the two:


Perseid Meteor Shower 2013 from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Watch this in 720P or 1080P HD resolution. Over six minutes of footage from recent nights in 2013 during the Perseid Meteor Shower. The slower, mostly horizontal lights are airplanes. The brief flashes of mostly vertical streaks are the meteors (a few slower ones are satellites). Many meteors are faint, so you'll only see most of them if you follow the instructions above and change the viewing resolution to HD and expand the video full screen.
For the soundtrack, the timelapse video of the Perseid meteor shower is set to the InFiction String Remix of David Bowie's "Let's Dance", as featured in the recent Kia commercial (used with permission).

All images © 2013 Jeff Sullivan. To license Perseid meteor shower or other time-lapse footage, please contact me. All unauthorized uses will be pursued.

Did You Catch the Perseid Meteor Shower Last Weekend?

I assembled this timelapse footage form the 2009 event and posted it on YouTube, with links from Facebook and Google+, so people could plan to go catch it.  I was shocked to see 9 or 10 days later that it had over 85,000 views!



Later this year I'll be leading a workshop to help people capture an even better event, the Geminid meteor shower, from Death Valley National Park.  Now you can produce results of astronomical proportions!  We'll try to follow a mix of day and night shooting, visiting some of the unique locations I've found while writing a guide book to landscape photography locations in Southern California.  I'm also working on securing a space for classroom sessions, so we can include critical post-processing training.  As always, contact me for further details!

Perseid Meteor Showers in August

It's that time of the year again! The annual Perseid Meteor Shower is underway. This year the peak nights of the shower will coincide with a full moon. This will obscure all but the brightest meteors, but there are still some decent opportunities for photography. Try early morning hours over the next few nights, after the moon has set. Even when the moon is in the sky you can shoot North-facing shots to face away from the moon and capture the brightest meteors, as well as star trails around the North Star, Polaris.

The meteors will appear to come from the radiant constellation Perseus, not far from Cassiopeia (a giant W you can spot more or less opposite the North Star from the Big Dipper). Get out someplace dark and clear, and enjoy the show! Best viewing hours are 11pm - 4:30am as the Eastern half of your sky rotates around to the leading side of the earth as we hurtle through space at 69,360 MPH around the sun (574,585 MPH relative to the Milky Way, another 1,339,200 MPH relative to other galaxies).

The moon sets at 11:30pm tonight, then roughly another hour later each night, so get outside in the early morning hours and watch the show, and capture star shots while the stars remain bright in the moonless sky.

Read down a few posts on my blog to see tips on capturing Milky Way or star trails photos. To maximize your odds of capturing some bright meteors, simply trigger your exposures as fast as your camera will go. I use an external "intervalometer" timer/trigger to start the next exposure one second after the previous one. By capturing dozens or hundreds of exposures in a row, you can capture many meteors over the course of many minutes or hours.

The photo at the top of this blog entry is a link to a whole album of Perseid Meteor Shower photos from past years. Go check them out for some inspiration or ideas!

Perseid Meteor Showers

Perseid Meteor Over Mono Lake Tufa, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

My next photography adventure was heading out to shoot the Perseid meteor showers. After a realtively weak showing at the first night at Mono Lake, in part due to the large amount of dust in the air there (great for sunrises, not so great for seeing stars or meteors rising over the eastern horizon), I drove down to the higher and clearer Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest.

This time I had spoken to Tom Lowe several times in the weeks leading up to the event and I decided not to wait to capture the crescent moon setting over the crest of the Sierra Nevada before driving up to the Patriarch Grove at 11,300 feet. Several other photographers on Flcir who had expressed an interest in shooting this event had communicated that they would not be making it after all, but photographer Jean Day was expecting to join us. As luck would have it, her truck was up on a jack with a flat tire, shortly after Schulman Grove, still 10 miles and at least a half hour to 40 minutes short of my destination.

Even worse, someone who stopepd to help had overextended the jack, breaking the handle in the process. I had both cans of Punture Seal and an air compressor built into my minivan, but my jack was too short, so I shot the crescent moon descending behind some communication towers while we waited for an adequate jack.

After several people stopped we eventually were able to get the truck down off its jack, and drive, inflate, drive, inflate our way to highway 168 before the leak in the tire got too bad to reinflate. Fortunately we had been able to flag down a flatbed tow truck on its way to another call, who would now be looking for her as he drove out. Jean urged me to get back up there and shoot, so I headed back up.

To make a long story short, I was off to a late start, but I found a shooting location which would not get lit up by late arrivals, and set my camera and intervalometer timer loose to capture hundreds of consecutive 30 second shots.

Lyrid Meteor Shower Peaks April 21/22

Meteor Over the Salt Flats, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Here are a couple of resources to help you identify where to look in the sky:

http://www.amsmeteors.org/showers.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_16541_view-lyrid-meteor.html

Here are the upcoing meteor showers for the year:

2010 Meteor Showers (major ones):
www.theskyscrapers.org/meteors/

Meteor shower calendar for 2010 (including smaller ones):
www.astronomia.org/2010/calfugaces.en.html

Search this blog for "meteor" for related posts, and for a discussion on converting a sequence of shots into a timelapse video using the free VirtualDub software:
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2009/08/perseid-meteor-shower-iii-hd-video.html

Perseid Meteor Shower III HD Video

Perseid Meteor Shower III HD Video, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (www.MyPhotoGuides.com).

This is my third and longest timelapse sequence yet from the Perseid Meteor Shower in August. I'll try to have sequences four and five done soon.

Make sure you have the HD display switched on (click on the HD symbol).

One of my first videos of this event was featured on Discover Magazine's blog.

Bear in mind that this is a timelapse video, so in playback as video everything is dramatically sped up. Each frame is a 15 to 30 second shot, but the video is assembled at a relatively slow frame rate of only 12 shots per second, so in video formats that play at 24 to 30 frames per second, the meteors show up for roughly two frames. In other words, each second of video displays ten to twenty minutes of shooting time. Apparently our eyes and minds are quick enough for us to perceive the meteors with some persistence even though they show up for only 1/12th of a second.

Anything that travels across the screen or survives in the video for more than a brief flash is a jet or satellite (and you can't see many of the meteors in most online copies of the video, unless you follow the links to Flickr and enable the highest HD playback available there). I'll try to find video hosting sites that enable blogging of copies that offer higher resolution playback, preferably full 1920 x 1080 HD. I'll also try to find some nice background music avalable under the Creative Commons CC-BY license (which does not seem to be a trivial search).

Meanwhile, if you'd like to explore timelapse photography yourself, download the free VirtualDub software which can convert a sequence of JPEG files into video, and check out the forum on Timescapes.org for discussions on techniques. You'll need a tripod of course, and your sequence of still images will turn out best if you use a remote switch that has an intervalometer (timer) function.

Perseid Meteors Near Tioga Pass: HD Video Timelapse II

Perseid Meteors Near Tioga Pass: HD Video Timelapse II, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (www.MyPhotoGuides.com).

To avoid smoke from forest fires in California I traveled to this location at an elevation of 10,000 feet near Tioga Pass in the Sierra Nevada.

To increase the visibility of the meteors, click through to the video's Flickr page and make sure you have the HD display switched on (click on the HD symbol). Then look near the center of the right half of the video to see the most meteors.

This sequence was assembled from 517 21 megapixel photos. The rescaling down to 1280 x 720 for uploading to Flickr helps eliminate much of the noise. The photos on this night were exposed for 10 to 20 seconds at an ISO sensitivity of 3200.

This was taken on the peak night for the meteor showers, but the moon makes all but the brightest meteors difficult to see, especially at these lower resolutions.

Perseid Meteor Shower HD Video

Perseid Meteor Shower HD Video, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (www.MyPhotoGuides.com).

Dozens of Perseid meteors fall in the course of over one hour, compressed into 5 seconds of HD video.

Go to my Flickr account and set the "HD" symbol under the display to see a higher resolution online.

Copyright © Jeff Sullivan 2009. All rights reserved. Do not copy or publish without permission.

Bug on the Earth's Windshield

Bug on the Earth's Windshield, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (www.MyPhotoGuides.com).

While hurling through space, the earth slams into a piece of debris from the Comet Swift-Tuttle (top right) during the annual Perseid Meteor Shower, as an orange moon rises through smoke from California's forest fires to shine on the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest at an elevation of 10,000 feet in the White Mountains.

One theory behind how life could spread among the stars is that amino acids could arrive on comets and survive the impact. It seems fitting to be among earth's oldest living things to witness comet debris falling to earth under the light of our neighboring stars.

Perseid Meteor Over the High Sierra

Perseid Meteor Over the High Sierra, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (www.MyPhotoGuides.com).

If you can find a patch of sky with minimal light pollution, the peak showers happening midnight to 5am tonight (Wed), and they'll continue at a declining rate for a few more days. The meteors appear to come from the constellation Perseus, which is near Casseopea (looks like a big W), and rises to the East/Northeast. This article has more info:

Strong Meteor Shower Expected Tonight

This shot of the Milky Way over the Sierras was taken earlier in the evening. Select the photo at the top of this article to go to its Flickr page and examine the EXIF shot details (using "More Details" link in the right column).