Over the last weekend you might have seen something on the news about the Perseid meteor shower peaking on Saturday night. If so, the first piece of advice to see them was to get away from the light pollution near any city.
I didn’t.
(These are the full-sized files with an incredible amount of detail – click on the images to blow them up to full sized!)
The good news is that the big, “light bucket” lens that I do dearly love does a great job of picking out a gazillion stars even under light polluted conditions.
(Ditto! Click on it! Please ignore all of the hot pixels I didn’t have the time to edit out!)
The bad news is that to avoid being totally oversexposed and washed out, these are 2.5 second exposures. I have nearly a thousand of them! Filled an entire 8GB memory card! I didn’t capture a single Persid meteor in any image. (Although if you check the top left on that first image, there’s a 737 going into Burbank…)
I did see two bright, long trails of Perseid meteors with my eyes, but they were where that second set of pictures of pointed, above the tree, while I was doing the first set of pictures, aimed more to the north to the left of the tree.
C’est le guerre…
I would love to get this lens out to a really dark sky where I can do 30, 60, even 300 second exposures and still have the background sky be dark. That would be fun.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 