Astrophotography and the Leonids
Posted on 11/18/2009, under astrophotography, gadgets, life, photography
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We (myself, Caroline, and Natalia) took a trip up to Mulholland drive to try and see some of Tuesday morning's Leonids meteor shower. Have to say, I was particularly struck by the idea that the two streams of particles causing this year's shower were from a comet's passing in 1466 and 1533, and so I decided to bring my camera along and see if I could capture anything. So, without building up the suspense any more than is completely necessary, here is my most recent attempt at photographing a medieval event:
(Get it? "Photographing a medieval event"? 'Cause I usually take photos of medieval recreation events, and the comet passed during the... OK, it's lame =P)It comes across pretty low-res here, so I highly recommend clicking through to the image itself, but that little streak above the horizon and just right of center is the only meteor I captured on film. Now, I don't mean to sound negative about this... I'm extremely happy and feel quite lucky to have captured anything, especially because we only saw about 10 meteors the entire four hours we were up there watching. Furthermore, this was the best one of the night, and I didn't even see it myself until I went through my photos!
When I say that this was the only meteor I captured, I actually mean that I got something other than meteor shots out of this. Yes, I learned more about astrophotography (I hope that's a real word =P) which will inform my future attempts and improve my photography skills. That's cool, but I'm always learning and improving when I go on a shoot. I also took the 400+ exposures that didn't include a streak of burning dust and put them together into two stop motion videos of the night sky changing as the earth rotates.
This first one includes the image above, and shows the hillside along Mulholland as seen facing almost due North-East:
The second is from another angle looking out over the greater Los Angeles area. Didn't capture any meteors as far as I know here... the bright streaks you do see are all planes going to or coming from LAX, spread out over the 15 second exposures:
Again, if it's difficult to see these very well, it might help to click through and view them on the YouTube site.
For reference, these shots were taken on my Sony Alpha 300 using the kit 18-70mm lens at an effective focal length of 27mm, ISO 400, with 15 second exposures at an f-stop of 3.0.
