Peseids Meteor Shower at Andrews Lake

Ready for an all nighter??  Please join us at Andrew’s Lake next weekend to photograph the Perseids Meteor Shower.

What:

The Perseids MS peaks Sunday morning the 13th at 3:33 am at 78 meteors per hour.  Moonrise is at 3:32 am (8% waning crescent).  Nighttime ends at 4:48 am.  Blue hours is at 5:58 am. Sunrise is at 6:25 am.

Where/When:

We will gather at the Andrew’s Lake lower parking lot (next to the lake) at 11 pm, Saturday night.  Please park with your car lights facing away from the lake.  We will walk a short distance (200 yards) on boardwalk/lake trail to a lake overlook that Nancy and I scouted out.  Elevation gain is +/- 30’.  Ideally, you will want to be shooting until +/- 4:30 am or later if you want to shoot a blue hour shot for blending

Kit:

Camera

Widest lens you have and lowest f/stop, ideally 14-16mm, f/2.8 or lower; 20 or 24mm lens will work, just captures less area

Tripod

Empty formatted card capable of up to 400-500 images

Fresh fully charged battery and

back-up battery

In camera intervalometer or external intervalometer (please be familiar with how to program, test it out at home), spare batteries

Low intensity headlamp or pen light

Camp chair/coffee/warm clothes, etc

Assistance:

This is a minimal assistance event.  We will help you with compositional alignment across the meteor shower radiant, suggest exposure times and ISO based on your camera and lens, and assist in focusing on a star using live view on your camera.  You are expected to know your camera buttons and functionality.  It will be dark.

Below are links to the National Parks at Night group blog on how to photograph a meteor shower and how to process a meteor shower.  Photographing a meteor shower is much like photographing the Milky Way, you just take a lot more photos in hope to capture the meteors.  Processing a meteor shower is much more labor intensive.  Per the link below, you need to first look through your images to find meteors, mark those images, export as layers into Photoshop, select a base image and then mask in all the meteors into that base image, and if necessary, rotate the meteor angle using Free Transform, in alignment with the radiant (radiant will move as the night progresses).

Please RSVP if you plan to attend.

https://www.nationalparksatnight.com/

https://www.nationalparksatnight.com/blog/2020/4/20/great-balls-of-fire-part-2-how-to-photograph-a-meteor-shower

https://www.nationalparksatnight.com/blog/2020/4/25/great-balls-of-fire-part-3-how-to-process-a-meteor-shower-radiant