Well, this from back in August at the Devil's Tower in Wyoming. I had taken my 9 year old granddaughter up with me so we could watch and capture the Perseids Meteor shower. It seemed like most of the meteors were away from Devil's Tower on that night, but after going through them, I found enough to compile.
The base layer here has a meteor in it and the side of the tower is lit up by rock climbers. I thought that added some nice extra visual interest.
I had 3 camera's up and running to capture the meteors on this night. This one was my Nikon D810 with a 50mm f1.8 lens. I wanted a shot where the tower was a bit more prominent in the image then it is with a 14mm. Getting closer wasn't really an option as I wanted to be able to shoot next to my Jeep in case my granddaughter got tired, and also moving in closer for this angle the trees quickly start to block the tower. So the 50mm seemed like a good fast option.
Now, there was a small problem with it, because it's 50mm, I had to limit my shutter speed to 10 sec so that the stars didn't start trailing. Which, if you see some of those really short meteors, I thought they were short because of the 10 seconds some how cutting them off with the opening and closing of the shutter the meteors were just too fast and I was losing half of the meteors. So initially I didn't even look that much at these since so many were so short. But when I went back, all of the short ones have a beginning and end to them, there is no sharp cut off. I decided my initial thoughts were wrong, it's just there was a ton of super short meteors that night. Also a couple of them actually have a curve in the middle of them like they hit something or went around something. It was very strange indeed.
One last thing, the night sky was pretty odd too, lot's going on in it. There was not one uniform color, lot's of air glow, etc. So I just went with it.
Anyway, this is what I ended up with.
All comments are welcome,
Jim
The base layer here has a meteor in it and the side of the tower is lit up by rock climbers. I thought that added some nice extra visual interest.
I had 3 camera's up and running to capture the meteors on this night. This one was my Nikon D810 with a 50mm f1.8 lens. I wanted a shot where the tower was a bit more prominent in the image then it is with a 14mm. Getting closer wasn't really an option as I wanted to be able to shoot next to my Jeep in case my granddaughter got tired, and also moving in closer for this angle the trees quickly start to block the tower. So the 50mm seemed like a good fast option.
Now, there was a small problem with it, because it's 50mm, I had to limit my shutter speed to 10 sec so that the stars didn't start trailing. Which, if you see some of those really short meteors, I thought they were short because of the 10 seconds some how cutting them off with the opening and closing of the shutter the meteors were just too fast and I was losing half of the meteors. So initially I didn't even look that much at these since so many were so short. But when I went back, all of the short ones have a beginning and end to them, there is no sharp cut off. I decided my initial thoughts were wrong, it's just there was a ton of super short meteors that night. Also a couple of them actually have a curve in the middle of them like they hit something or went around something. It was very strange indeed.
One last thing, the night sky was pretty odd too, lot's going on in it. There was not one uniform color, lot's of air glow, etc. So I just went with it.
Anyway, this is what I ended up with.
All comments are welcome,
Jim