Eta Aquarids

[CapturingTheNight]

Hi all,

After a late night FB conversation with Humayun we decided to finally meet up in person about halfway between each other and see if we could photograph some of the Eta Aquarids together. With neither of us really familiar with the area around Coolac and meeting up at about 1am we just decided to head down the nearest dirt back road and look for some picturesque trees on the side of the road.

You can see H's great effort here: http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=106844

"Eta Aquarids"
138703

2013 Eta Aquarids meteor shower. The radiant for this meteor shower was rising in the north east in the early hours but after observing all the sections of sky the longer and brighter meteors seemed to be predominately in the opposite direction, but if you traced their paths back through the sky most were coming from the radiant point. The meteors that I observed near the radiant were all very short lived and faint.
I had my camera shooting continuous frames. This picture is compiled from one base frame for the landscape, sky and the meteor to the left of the tree. I then went through the other frames with this composition and selected the ones with meteors and masked them on top of the base image. Thin, high level cloud has bloated some of the stars and made them appear much larger and brighter than normal (particularly the star on the left).

Cheers

Greg

[Larryp]

That's excellent, Greg:thumbsup:

[iceman]

Love a dead tree silhouette against the sky. Great shot!

[Octane]

That has come out spectacular, mate! The subtle colours and the positioning of that tree is just bang on. :)

How did you go last night?

H

[Ross G]

A beautiful photo Greg.


Ross.

[lacad01]

Great shot, a lot of great elements captured :thumbsup:

[Phil Hart]

Great work you two :-)

It's certainly true that the longer/brighter meteors appear further away from the radiant. But you will get more meteors per image area near the radiant. Meteor length in my images is very neatly correlated with distance from the radiant.

This is largely a perspective effect.. the ones near the radiant you are seeing head-on so they don't move much relative to sky background. Imagine trying to get a night blur shot of a car moving towards you.

There's a probably an additional effect of meteors grazing the atmosphere at shallower angles making them brighter? Not so sure about that part of it..

Phil

[gregbradley]

Ahh Bellisimo Greg. Perfect. The subtle air glow hues ( they are interesting in time lapses - I have quite a collection of them now), the framing as usual to your high standards, the vibrance of the Milky Way, the tree. I like the vignetting effect, it draws attention to the centre area of the image. Perfect.:eyepop:

Greg.

[multiweb]

Superb as usual Greg. Great comp and colors. :thumbsup:

[Deeno]

Lovely!

[CapturingTheNight]

Thank you so much for all the great feedback everyone :D



Makes sense. Thanks Phil. I initially wanted to do a radiant shot but I completely forgot about the moon almost being in the middle of the radiant on this night.



I was so happy when I walked up that hill to find this tree there. I could only just make it out from the road. Lucky we did stop at that spot or I never would have seen it.