Hi all. Anyone go out during the week to see the eta aquarid meteor shower which peaked on the morning of the 6th? This shower is attributed to debris from Comet Halley and is one of the better displays in the southern sky. It is generally pretty weak, though there was the possibility of a stronger show this year.
I got up at 4:15am on Wednesday to find cloudy skies over Melbourne, but in the hope of seeing a good display I drove for over an hour north (near Seymour) to clearing skies and set up the camera. BTW Melbourne roads are fantastically free of traffic at 4:30am...and I caught most of the lights! Being recently retrenched I also didn't have work to go to afterwards!
I was lucky enough to capture an eta aquarid meteor in my tripod mounted 450D, 10-22mm lens at 10mm, f/3.5, 50secs, ISO1600. You'll see it upper left streaking away S out of Grus (identity was confirmed by backtracking its trajectory N passing through the eta aquarid radiant). Some nice Milky Way fields too. Enjoy! Russ.
I tried last week, left the camera going all night, but now realise I used the wrong exposure settings (200ISO, 300 second, F/5.6). Learned for next time
Thanks everyone. Yep, common run-of-the-mill meteors are hard to capture. Fireballs are much easier, 'cept you don't get many opportunities! Starlight is captured for the duration of the exposure - the meteor for only a fraction of a second.
For interest, here are a couple of my Leonid meteor images from Egypt in 1999. The first (a single frame centred on Orion) has at least 12 meteor tracks, the second contains a fireball that lit up the ground (Sirius is the bright star). The best meteor display of my life, though Leonids 1998 was pretty good!
