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
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.
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.
