Perseid Meteor shower 2022

This year during the Perseid meteor shower, I was on holiday in the Belgian Ardennes. On the hills we had a nice open view of the night sky. On the night of August 12, we were lucky enough to have a clear sky, so went outside, on the hunt to see some nice meteors. Unfortunately the frequency of meteors was not very high. But there were some pretty bright ones that made for some spectacular experiences.

I setup my camera with a 21mm lens on a stationary tripod and started shooting. In total 145 photos were made between 23:09 and 23:40h. Only one (!) of them had captured what we were looking for. In fact it had captured two fairly bright meteors in one image. Normally to have multiple meteors in one image, you have to stack multiple images with each one meteor. Last year using this method I was able to capture a composite of 8 meteors. So having two meteors of this magnitude in one image is really lucky.

Images were captured using a Leica SL2 camera with Leica Summilux-M 21mm f/1.4 lens. This lens is horrible for astrophotography. You can see the heavy astigmatism and aberrations in the corner of the image. But it was the widest lens brought with me for the holiday. And at f/1.4 it is very fast. Exposures were 10s at ISO800. Not much was done in processing, other than removing a plane-trail and some regular contrast and saturation enhancements. The image was taken actually just above the horizon, so for artistic reasons the horizon was brought in from another image. This was very quickly done using the sky replacement tool in Photoshop.

To get a taste of what is possible with meteor photography, you may want to check out this composite image full of meteors, or this close-up gif sequence showing the dust coming off the burning meteor.