Eta Aquarids - composite

[geoffsims]

During the early hours of 6th May, 2013, I photographed the Eta Aquarid meteor shower from near Newman in Western Australia.

This image is a composite photo, made up of over 20 individual images that contained a bright meteor. The images were corrected for the rotation of the Earth, and stacked.

The moon (bright object in the lower middle of the frame) is lighting up the landscape.

Canon 5D Mark III, 14 mm, series of 30 secs at f/2.8, ISO 3200

[gregbradley]

The best meteor shower image I have ever seen.

That's a cracker of a shot.

Greg.

[Sarge]

Brilliant Geoff. An amazing shot.
:thumbsup:
Well done.

Clear skies

Rod
:D:D

[RickS]

Lovely, Geoff!

[Octane]

As mentioned elsewhere, beautiful work, mate. :)

H

[iceman]

Stunning work Geoff!

[Astroman]

Saw this on Facebook first. Excellent shot!

[geoffsims]

Thanks everyone!

Greg:



That's a big call, but I really appreciate it!

[Deeno]

Spectacular!

[ourkind]

That's beautiful Geoff! The radiant couldn't be clearer!!

[callingrohit]

Geoff, this image blew my mind...it should be in books that talk about meteor showers to exactly show the radiant behaviour.

Just awesomly beautiful.

Can you explain how you corrected for rotation of earth ?

[geoffsims]

Thanks Carlos!

Vivek - the theory is easy. You set one image as your base layer, then find each frame with a meteor in it, overlay the image, and rotate until the stars line up. Then your meteor will be placed correctly, relative to the stars.

How you do it in practice is another issue. I did it manually in Photoshop, setting the blend layer to "difference" and manually lining up the stars. The rotation is hard this way unless you can see the SCP in your image, which I couldn't. In that sense I did quite a rough job, but you can see it worked out fine.

A better way would be to use some alignment software that is used to stack images, or Colin has suggested ways to do it using stabilising routines in After Effects - but in any case the idea is the same.

Geoff

[callingrohit]

Thanks Geoff.

That sounds like a lot of hardwork and eye strain.

I think you should come out with a PS action which would be a bit complicated as registering would be involved.

By the way do you have a link where Colin has explained his version of this methodology.

Thanks

[Ric]

Great work Geoff

A very enjoyable image.

[StephenM]

Beautiful image Geoff! Certainly shows the radiant well.

Cheers,
Stephen

[CapturingTheNight]

Brilliant work Geoff. I really must photograph a meteor shower in anger one night to do something similar. Never given it a proper go like this before.

[Ross G]

An amazing photo Geoff.

Ross.

[astronobob]

Awesome capturing Geoff, & a spectacular resulting Image :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[OzEclipse]

Geoff,

Incredible photo. I was lucky enough to witness many of these meteors a bit north of you. Takes me right back there to a great week.

Joe

[alexch]

What a great image! Geoff, send it to APOD either now or before the Eta Aquarids shower next year.

Cheers,
Alex

[geoffsims]

Thanks again for the kind words everyone.

Vivek: Colin didn't explain in detail the technique. You use warp stabiliser which "stablises" motion in video, but in this case it will stabilise on the images and cause them to become aligned. I'm sure you can Google this process, and just apply it to this particular example.

Greg: Yep, everything came together - clear dark skies, minimal Moon interference, and a stronger than average meteor shower. Could be a go'er next year!

Alex: Thanks! Is late, but no harm in trying I guess :)

[colinmlegg]

Warp Stabiliser works better around 50 mm. At wider angle you need more than just rotate, pan and scale to align stars image wide. For my train shot I had to mask the area for warping quite close to the area of interest to get it to work ok. And vary the mask as the train moved across the scene. So some manual intervention. My earlier train (asteroid + train) was 50 mm, and worked with no manual guiding.

So should I do my composite and submit to APOD as well??