Perseid Meteors

At the beginning of this week I’ve been able to go out to Lake Monticello for one of my favorite photography outings. The Perseid Meteor shower. It is one of my favorite times but one I’ve not been able to do in several years! Either scheduling, weather, health, etc… the list of excuses is long. This year I decided to toss the excuses and not listen to the new one in my head of “I’ll be too tired to go out that early” and went.

(From left to right) 1.) My camera setup watching the show. 2.) Gotta have the Thermacell! 3.) The view of the Lake Monticello parking lot.

I’ve mentioned above I went out to Lake Monticello two mornings this week (August 11 & 12). I got out there both mornings by about 1:30. Monday morning seemed to be better than Sunday morning as far as number of Meteors I saw. Monday morning the number of meteors seemed to really pick up around 3:30 but my batteries died to my camera! I had forgotten to recharge after Sunday’s outing. When it went out I first said no big deal I’ve got a spare but it was dead too! (Fail MG!)

Sunday morning I sat out on what would be the lake bed if the lake was full so I got a view of the water.

*No meteors here but I liked the reflection from the water captured here*

*No meteors again (they’re coming) but this was my view Sunday morning watching the Perseids*

*Just barley did catch this one!* (ignore the airplane on the left side)

*This was a long one, I actually had it in two 30 second images.*

*This was the brightest meteor I photographed on the two mornings*.

*I put together a composite of the three photos into this one*.

Ok, that was morning one, I liked this setup with the view of the lake. I was tired Sunday, I went to bed at 6:30 Sunday evening!

Ok now for morning two. Monday morning I went back to Lake Monticello but setup in a different spot. I did not have a good view of the lake so I focused more on getting pictures of meteors. I saw many more on this morning but most were just out of frame it seems. My first setup of my camera I run for about an hour at a 30 second shutter for each image. I did not get but one photo of a meteor in this setup…

I moved my camera after about an hour and set my shutter speed down to 10 seconds to get more photos. In this set I captured two meteors in one 10 second shutter (I’ve never had that happen before). It was shortly after this my battery died so I packed up and headed home and of course saw some bright meteors on my way home!