Share you 2016 Perseid meteor images here

alliben wrote in post #18093656
Thanks for the compliment and tip Celestron, I just did so.

Nicely done, hopefully spaceweather will share some of yours.
(and I notice we both have the 70D and 11-16 Tokina lens)

rdalrt wrote in post #18094120
My first time ever shooting the night sky. Was a bit disappointed with the meteor shower actually, but the aurora came out for a few minutes, so that was cool.

Here are a few I managed that had a meteor or two in em.

Very nice captures ! I've always liked the FEs' but never had one .

I took a couple hundred as well, only find one small one on the card. I found that the long exposure would often times cover up a meteor because it happened too soon into the exposure. Those big early ones were phenomenal, I've never seen one that stretched across the horizon like they did Thursday.

mqqse wrote in post #18094332
I took a couple hundred as well, only find one small one on the card. I found that the long exposure would often times cover up a meteor because it happened too soon into the exposure. Those big early ones were phenomenal, I've never seen one that stretched across the horizon like they did Thursday.

Nice capture. One thing about digital is you can shoot 10 images and if you know you didn't capture a meteor you can delete those 10 so your memory doesn't fill as fast .

mtbdudex wrote in post #18094225
Nicely done, hopefully spaceweather will share some of yours.
(and I notice we both have the 70D and 11-16 Tokina lens)

Thanks. Yeah, this combo works well.

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #18094054
Alright, here's the fruits of my labor:

Taken from Moosehorn Lake in the Uinta Mountains of Utah. Altogether about 125 shots went into making this one shot with my Nikon D600 and Rokinon 24mm f1.4 lens on my Star Adventurer Tracking Mount as well as my Nikon D7000 and Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens on my iOptron Skytracker mount.

Very nice. Why does it make me think of a porcupine?

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #18094054
Alright, here's the fruits of my labor:

Taken from Moosehorn Lake in the Uinta Mountains of Utah. Altogether about 125 shots went into making this one shot with my Nikon D600 and Rokinon 24mm f1.4 lens on my Star Adventurer Tracking Mount as well as my Nikon D7000 and Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens on my iOptron Skytracker mount.

That's fantastic! I went out to shoot the Perseids, but was mostly clouded out with the exception of the occasional opening in part of the sky. Still, I did manage to see a half-dozen or so... most faint but one nice fireball.

Also, I think you may be the only person I know of who has both the iOptron and the Sky-Watcher tracking heads. I'm wondering how you compare them. From what I can see of them it looks like the Sky Watcher is likely the stronger and better mount, especially with the counterweight bar (if you have the counterweight bar) and it looks like their optional wedge is better as well (although it's not included for the standard price.)

mqqse wrote in post #18094332
I took a couple hundred as well, only find one small one on the card. I found that the long exposure would often times cover up a meteor because it happened too soon into the exposure. Those big early ones were phenomenal, I've never seen one that stretched across the horizon like they did Thursday.

Yup, I think long exposure times are more detrimental, the optical quality and aperture are significantly more important for capturing meteors. You REALLY need a fast lens with an aperture that can go wider than f2, for example I shot about 1,500 exposures (either 10 seconds or 15 seconds long) with my Nikon D600 and Rokinon 24mm f1.4 lens and captured about 150 meteors in those images (~125 total shots had meteors, some with multiple). With my Nikon D7000 and Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens I took about 900 exposures (all of them 30 seconds long) and only 22 exposures had meteors in them. So roughly 1 out of every 12 exposures with the Rokinon and 1 out of every 41 with the Tokina.

alliben wrote in post #18094378
Very nice. Why does it make me think of a porcupine?

Ha, thanks, never thought of it that way.

TCampbell wrote in post #18094479
That's fantastic! I went out to shoot the Perseids, but was mostly clouded out with the exception of the occasional opening in part of the sky. Still, I did manage to see a half-dozen or so... most faint but one nice fireball.

Also, I think you may be the only person I know of who has both the iOptron and the Sky-Watcher tracking heads. I'm wondering how you compare them. From what I can see of them it looks like the Sky Watcher is likely the stronger and better mount, especially with the counterweight bar (if you have the counterweight bar) and it looks like their optional wedge is better as well (although it's not included for the standard price.)

The Star Adventurer is SIGNIFICANTLY higher quality (I also have the counterweight bar), I'm going to recommend it from now on to anyone asking about tracking mounts. The body design of the iOptron is a real flaw, I basically can't use larger lenses for extended periods of tracking because eventually the camera body/lens will hit the body of the tracker. Also the problem with the thumb screws on the base plate of the tracker is ridiculous. Besides those things, the Star Adventurer is just much better overall, the built in polar scope is optically much higher quality and nice not having to remove after alignment like with the iOptron. There are several speed options for tracking (stars, solar, lunar, 12x, 1.5x, etc), you have fine tuning controls for making adjustments to both the Dec and RA axis after you've got your target aligned, you can don 1-axis guiding, you can even connect your camera to the mount and have it act as a intervelometer if you want. You just have to make sure you buy the astro package with the declination bracket, if you buy the photo package it comes with an adapter to attach your camera to that covers the polar scope hole so you can polar align with the camera mounted up. With the Dec bracket you can always polar align because there is a gap in the bracket for the polar scope to see through. I've gotten up to 5 minute exposures with my Nikon D7000 and Tamron 150-600mm lens on the Star Adventurer, I could never do more than 1 minute with the iOptron and that camera/lens. Even though the Star Adventurer is about $120 more (with the EQ wedge and counterweight bar) it's definitely worth it.

alliben wrote in post #18093947
Thanks. I bit my lip several times when I saw a nice meteor zip through my frame while the camera was in between exposures.

Isn't that frustrating? 30 second exposures, and I had about a 3 or 4 second delay between them. I saw it happen a couple of times.

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #18094504
Yup, I think long exposure times are more detrimental, the optical quality and aperture are significantly more important for capturing meteors. You REALLY need a fast lens with an aperture that can go wider than f2, for example I shot about 1,500 exposures (either 10 seconds or 15 seconds long) with my Nikon D600 and Rokinon 24mm f1.4 lens and captured about 150 meteors in those images (~125 total shots had meteors, some with multiple). With my Nikon D7000 and Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens I took about 900 exposures (all of them 30 seconds long) and only 22 exposures had meteors in them. So roughly 1 out of every 12 exposures with the Rokinon and 1 out of every 41 with the Tokina.

I agree that a (good) faster lens is better, however that doesn't necessarily mean that longer exposures are detrimental, other than star trailing (likely not an issue, in your case), or possibly overexposure due to light pollution. I don't think it would matter at what time in the exposure the meteor appeared. Once the light hits the sensor, it's there. The pixels around it will still be receiving photons that can wash out the image, so it would be better to have a meteor immediately, and then stop the exposure. Again, that really only applies if light pollution is a problem.

Regarding your findings, shooting f/1.4 vs f/2.8, you're letting in 4 times the amount of light. I would think that had the biggest effect on what you're seeing.

I'd be very interested to know more about your results.

Were both cameras shooting simultaneously? If so, did you find any meteors on the f/1.4 setup that the f/2.8 setup didn't capture?

I'm kicking myself for not setting up my wife's D7100 (Yes, we're a Canon/Nikon family. Bad idea!) pointed at a different part of the sky.

andicus wrote in post #18094809
Isn't that frustrating? 30 second exposures, and I had about a 3 or 4 second delay between them. I saw it happen a couple of times.

I think you can get rid of most of the delay.

The way I do it there is just a fraction of a second between exposures. I set my shutter speed to 30 seconds and my drive to low speed continuous and then lock the shutter down with a remote release.

bpalermini wrote in post #18094832
I think you can get rid of most of the delay.

The way I do it there is just a fraction of a second between exposures. I set my shutter speed to 30 seconds and my drive to low speed continuous and then lock the shutter down with a remote release.

Interesting! I may have to try that, next time. Thanks for the suggestion.

I was using the intervalometer that comes with Magic Lantern.

It has a setting that should not have a delay, and initially it seemed okay. When I started my shoot, it seemed to change to 3-4 seconds.

I'm going to mess around with it to see if it was user error.

Outside what everyone suggested I might also suggest two things . Make sure your card is a fast writer , otherwise you might be waiting on camera to write data to your card . Second , make sure your camera is set to multiple exposures or continuous as suggested above . I use a remote that I manually trip shutter after each exposure and I trip it for next exposure Everytime the previous exposure closes . That's less than a second between exposures .

bpalermini wrote in post #18094832
I think you can get rid of most of the delay.

The way I do it there is just a fraction of a second between exposures. I set my shutter speed to 30 seconds and my drive to low speed continuous and then lock the shutter down with a remote release.

Do you use mirror lock-up?

andicus wrote in post #18094828
I agree that a (good) faster lens is better, however that doesn't necessarily mean that longer exposures are detrimental, other than star trailing (likely not an issue, in your case), or possibly overexposure due to light pollution. I don't think it would matter at what time in the exposure the meteor appeared. Once the light hits the sensor, it's there. The pixels around it will still be receiving photons that can wash out the image, so it would be better to have a meteor immediately, and then stop the exposure. Again, that really only applies if light pollution is a problem.

Regarding your findings, shooting f/1.4 vs f/2.8, you're letting in 4 times the amount of light. I would think that had the biggest effect on what you're seeing.

I'd be very interested to know more about your results.

Were both cameras shooting simultaneously? If so, did you find any meteors on the f/1.4 setup that the f/2.8 setup didn't capture?

I'm kicking myself for not setting up my wife's D7100 (Yes, we're a Canon/Nikon family. Bad idea!) pointed at a different part of the sky.

At first I was shooting the same portion of the sky, did that for about 10 minutes, then I thought to myself "why the hell am I using two cameras to shoot the same exact thing?" So I switched the D7000/Tokina to the lake and tried to capture reflections, which wasn't working well, so I switched it to take shots straight east. I only had one meteor captured when both cameras were targeting the same thing and both cameras caught it, fwiw here are the two shots for comparison:

D600 + Rokinon 24mm f1.4: