2023 Perseids and Mesquite Tree

In the wee hours of this morning, my mother Doris' birthday, I drove out east of Dallas looking for dark(er) skies to view and capture the 2023 Perseid meteor shower. The first spot I had planned to try turned out to have more brightness in the sky than I hoped for so I went a little farther out and found a quiet spot on a country road in College Mound just southeast of Terrell. Parking well off the road in front of a pasture gate, I set up two cameras shooting east across the pasture with a mesquite tree in the foreground. I'm still going through all the images and may eventually post a composite similar to the one I did in 2016 but this image has the best and brightest of the ones I captured. 

This was taken with a Nikon D750 using an Irix Firefly 15mm f/2.4 wide angle lens. It's a 20 second exposure taken at f/2.8 and IS) 6400. I processed it in Lightroom to adjust brightness, contrast and color temperature. 

Not an ideal composition given the streaking speck of comet dust is right at the edge of the frame and cut off midflight but it's still a beauty. And it's not alone. Besides the Pleiades and Jupiter, look close and you'll find at least one other Perseid and at least one satellite. Even with the comparatively dark Bortle 4.5 class skies, there are still light domes on the horizon from towns further east like Wills Point to the left. The yellowish glow towards the center is from the rising crescent moon not yet visible above the treeline.

I'll share more once I have time to go through the rest of the images from both cameras. In the meantime, enjoy!

Click the image to enlarge. 

Perseid Meteor Shower Watching Success but Photography Fail

For this year's Perseid shower, other things got in the way of getting out to a dark sight to view it or to even be up watching pre-dawn on the 12th but that evening we sat out in the back yard with two of our grandkids, Jack and Harper, to try and catch at least a few bright ones. 

The good news is that we did each see at least one. The bad news is that was before I set up my camera to capture this time lapse video. The other challenge besides the light-polluted skies of Dallas are how many other lights there are in our back yard. The ever-changing color of the neon clock in the kitchen, visible through the back door or even the time one of us went to the bathroom (the window next to the back door) were the least of the problems. I'd turned out our patio LED light strings and the solar path lights but neighbors to the west and southwest have a lot of yard lights on all night. This video represents from about 11pm through about 3am and it was never truly dark out there. 

Normally, I would have had the camera at about ISO 4000, f/2.4 and shooting 20 second shots. The best I could do without blowing things out was ISO 400, f/2.8 and 8 second shots. That was still enough to catch stars rotating around Polaris and should have caught any bright bolides. Sadly, the only lights in the sky besides stars were aircraft going to and from Love Field and DFW.

I had been tempted to go out east of Dallas by myself about 5am to see if I could shoot the Perseids from a darker sight. Glad I didn't bother as the clouds rolling in would have spoiled the view under even the darkest skies. 

View full screen to catch the motion of the stars.

2016 Perseids

Named for the constellation from which they appear to originate, Perseus, the Perseid meteor shower is the result of the Earth plowing into dust and particles left behind by past journeys through the Solar System of comet Swift-Tuttle. 

Read more about the Perseids on Space.com.

This is a blend of four images captured with Nikon D7000 and Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 between 4:30 and 5:30am in Garland, Texas. Thanks to David Kingham for the blending technique (here).

Image shared by EarthSky (tweet, Facebook)

Fireballs!!

Two Perseid meteors over Sunnyvale, Texas pre-dawn Aug 11th (top one cut off mid-flight).

Raw, unedited image

More on the 2016 Perseid meteor shower here.