16/08/2026
It’s raining Perseids! The evening / night of August the 12th was very special this year - not only did we have a solar eclipse, but later that evening was also the peak of the Perseid Meteor shower. It coincided with a new moon and clear skies - perfect viewing conditions. After the eclipse, I headed down to a quiet spot on the Gower coast to see how many I could catch.
This is a composite image with 22 meteors photographed over a two hour period - I saw more but they were off camera. Photographing meteors is a bit of an inexact science as you simply don’t know when one will appear, so the best strategy is to keep shooting using an intervalometer and hope you catch one! I tend to use a shorter exposure and higher ISO - longer exposures via a tracker and lower ISO means you can often loose the contrast between the meteor and the sky. In the past I’ve got excited thinking I’ve captured a fantastic meteor in a 90 second tracked exposure, only to find nothing on the back of the camera! This image comprises a stack of 26 light frames and 4 darks for the sky and 4 stacked images of the foreground. In total I took 280 shots, 22 of which contained a meteor which I then individually blended in on the base image in PS. Each exposure was 20s @ ISO4000 f/1.8 FL20mm.
The Perseids are so called because they have a radiant point in the Perseus region of the sky, which basically means that if you look south at the Milky Way then they will all appear to come down vertically on the screen. I did capture one meteor that went from right to left, and this one seemed a little slower and had more of a yellowish tone rather than the greenish colour typical of a Perseid meteor. Not sure exactly what it was, but I guess this was something else burning up in the atmosphere.
