08/17/2026
Long-ish Post!
Finally getting my few shots up from my outing last week shooting the Perseid Meteor Shower. I had somewhat attempted to shoot a meteor shower once before but didn't have any luck. This time, I thought I was a little more prepared.
I used a star tracker that I attach my camera to, which tracks the portion of the sky I have it pointed at as the night goes on. As the Earth turns, so does what is called the radiant point, which is the portion of the sky that the meteors in a shower appear to come from. For this shower, it is near the constellation Perseus, hence the name of the shower.
I had the tracker going for probably close to six hours, and I could tell it was tracking the sky, so I figured we were set. I took over 800 photos during that six-hour span, and 34 of them had meteors in them. Ideally, I could blend those 34 together in Photoshop, and you would be able to see all the meteors in one shot.
Unfortunately, at some point during the night, the camera/tripod/tracker shifted slightly, probably due to the wind blowing it. So when I went to blend all the photos together, the stars didn't align, making it look like a blurry, awful mess.
There is software that I use to align the stars, but unfortunately, it removes objects that it thinks don't belong there i.e., all the meteors. So, after a very tedious masking process in Photoshop, I got them all into one shot.
I had planned to blend the sky photo with a foreground of the lake we were at, which I figured would be no problem since I have blended lots of photos before. Sadly, I just couldn't get it to look even remotely natural, so I decided to stick with the sky. I caught a lot of very pretty green and red meteors, and I didn't want to just trash it all.
I learned a lot about what to do better for the next meteor shower, so better luck next time!
Thankfully, I did have one of my older cameras with me, so while one camera was shooting the meteors, I got a nice shot of the Milky Way. So, the night wasn't a complete waste.
