Leonid Shower 11/17

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Archive 2009 · Leonid Shower 11/17

hobbes
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p.2 #1 · Leonid Shower 11/17

Did anyone capture any good shots from last night and would care to post your results?

Nov 18, 2009 at 05:38 AM

jasoncallen
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p.2 #2 · Leonid Shower 11/17

I was outside freezing my A** off with my lady friend until about 3, and we only saw a few brief ones (lots of light pollution in our area).

I'll post what I've got when I'm done tinkering with the shots in Photoshop. Nothing really stellar in the shots (I'm an astrophotography n00b), but the 2-3 dozen meteors that I saw (before the clouds rolled in) were pretty impressive! One or two of 'em were bright enough to cast shadows.

Nov 18, 2009 at 06:21 AM

NightOwl Cat
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p.2 #3 · Leonid Shower 11/17

We've got rain this week, so there's nothing to capture here. Figures..

Nov 18, 2009 at 12:47 PM

Shutterslam
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p.2 #4 · Leonid Shower 11/17

I got skunked but a meetup group north of the city caught some action before the clouds rolled in around 2

Here's the time lapse I got from my balcony...had apply a perspective shift to 2300 frames to de-fish-ify the photo so the buildings look fatter than they should.

STARRY NIGHT

About 3 years back, I actually saw 3 fireballs streaking across the sky. No such luck this time, but it was still an interesting experiment with the new equipment.

For what it's worth...I set the intervalometer to capture 2550 frames...I got 2300 before the card filled up (16gb card at jpeg fine)...It didn't matter though because cloud cover at peak time killed the show.

other settings
jpeg fine
iso 1000
f5.6
5" exposures
wb set to 3200k
image review turned off
color controls set to neutral
intervalometer was set to ~830 intervals of 3 frames 17 seconds apart start at 2:00am and end 4 hours later

2 EN EL batteries were used in about 40 degree weather. The entire set drained one battery fully and left the 2nd at 20%.

Time lapse video compiled in Quicktime, exported as an mov, then encoded to flv for embedding in a flash player.

Nov 18, 2009 at 03:37 PM

oobie
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p.2 #5 · Leonid Shower 11/17

Cool!

I guess it's one way to get that shutter count up to a respectable number.

Nov 18, 2009 at 04:04 PM

lou f
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p.2 #6 · Leonid Shower 11/17

still looks deadly, gona have to give that a whirl.

Nov 18, 2009 at 04:17 PM

poisonpill
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p.2 #7 · Leonid Shower 11/17

Shutterslam wrote:
I got skunked but a meetup group north of the city caught some action before the clouds rolled in around 2

Here's the time lapse I got from my balcony...had apply a perspective shift to 2300 frames to de-fish-ify the photo so the buildings look fatter than they should.

STARRY NIGHT

About 3 years back, I actually saw 3 fireballs streaking across the sky. No such luck this time, but it was still an interesting experiment with the new equipment.

For what it's worth...I set the intervalometer to capture 2550 frames...I got 2300 before the card filled up (16gb card at jpeg fine)...It didn't matter though because cloud cover at peak time killed the show.

other settings
jpeg fine
iso 1000
f5.6
5" exposures
wb set to 3200k
image review turned off
color controls set to neutral
intervalometer was set to ~830 intervals of 3 frames 17 seconds apart start at 2:00am and end 4 hours later

2 EN EL batteries were used in about 40 degree weather. The entire set drained one battery fully and left the 2nd at 20%.

Time lapse video compiled in Quicktime, exported as an mov, then encoded to flv for embedding in a flash player.

Wow great work and cool idea. I haven't played with intervalometer videos in years. Do you have any where you see streaks?

Nov 18, 2009 at 04:36 PM

Shutterslam
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p.2 #8 · Leonid Shower 11/17

Sadly no. There are only 3 periods during the entire time lapse when a significant portion of the sky was clear enough to have seen any streaks, which amounted to about 800 or so frames.

I swear after studying each frame over 3 hours I'm sure I started to go a little loopy thinking cloud wisps were streaks. What it boils down to that, I didn't get any visible fireballs in the section of the sky I was covering, and the light pollution was heavy enough to kill any chance of seeing the typical meteor trails.

The problem I encountered was balancing the sensitivity of the sensor versus the ambient light levels. Too sensitive and it blew the exposures, too low an iso wouldn't be enough to capture anything but the brightest streak (figure the average streak lasts about a second)...so I settled around 1000iso.

I also knew there were clouds rolling in so there was far less motivation to find a good viewing spot knowing the show would be obscured around prime time.

As for the shutter count...yeah - that part was pretty painful, but hey, Leonids only come once a year right?

Nov 18, 2009 at 04:48 PM

E-Vener
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p.2 #9 · Leonid Shower 11/17

That is beautiful. One of the things I love about photography is how it can reveal what we cannot see with the naked eye.

Nov 18, 2009 at 05:18 PM

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