Perseid Meteor Shower!

So last night was the the annual Perseid Meteor Shower and I took the opportunity to head out to the desert and camp out for the night. Drove about 1.5 hours from my house out in to the desert and camped out. This morning I woke up at 5am, drove home, took a shower and by 8am I was in a meeting at the office!

Click here for some more info on the Perseid Meteor Shower

If you are reading this on Sunday Aug 12... It may not be too late for you to go out and see the meteor show... 

Aug 12th is actually a better day then the 11th that I went out!

Over the course of the night I saw over 150 meteors, most of them standard shooting stars; which are impressive to say the least! But out of all that I saw there were 6 truly spectacular ones... Like unbelievable computer generated ones! Huge and bright with very long sparkling tails that covered 50 degrees in the sky from tip to tail! Magical!

In total I took 54 pictures, most 30 seconds in exposure... Some of them you will see below... But of all 54 I only managed to capture ONE meteor... Unfortunately it was in one of the pictures I planned to delete.

Because its pitch black (no moon at this time) you really cant see anything so to set up the position of the camera you take test shots and instead of waiting 30seconds to see if the camera is aimed as you want it, what you do is lower the exposure and boost up the ISO to the max of 12,800... This results in a very very poor quality and grainy image but it serves the purpose of aiming the camera. This is the type of picture that captured the meteor.... After a bit of post processing I can make the picture worth showing!

On top of that the meteor that came out was very very dim. I probably would not have seen it with the naked eye.... The big meteors are 10,000 times bigger and brighter then the one you see below!

Please click the pictures to make them bigger and to see them in even better

 quality click the options button and download the picture!

Pics taken with a Canon 50D 10-22mm glass.

What you are seeing is the Milky Way.

Hope you liked the pics... If you did leave a quick comment below!

Now I am off to pack! Tomm night I leave on a 10 day trip to Scandinavia which starts off in Iceland where the Aurora Borealis is forecasted to be in full swing!