Shooting Stars: Preparing to Photograph
the Perseid Meteor Shower ☄
Astrophotography For Beginners

With a few successful astrophotography shoots under my belt, mostly dealing with composition, I was ready to attempt to capture the : ::motion:: : of the sky–stars that shoot. The Perseid Meteor Shower, an annual display of displaced comet debris, offered such an opportunity. So I’d be packing up my camp stuff and hitting the road, along with a list of wishes for the occasion.

The Constellation Perseus, Perseid’s radiant or origin point, will be where I will point my lens, star gazing in-between the long exposures with the hopes of taking home a piece of the sky to share with you. With a campsite booked well in advance, I’d spend the night at Cherry Springs State Park honing my skills. And there should be much to gawk and grin at. The Perseids are one of the most active, colorful and reliable of the annual meteor streams, peaking at an estimated maximum of 110 meteors per hour, second only to the Geminids meteor shower in December.

Preparation: Looking Up When to Look Up

As with the other astrophotography shoots, I begin with utilizing ephemerides to identify a time frame for the shoot. Do you like that fancy word I used? Since I still (and forever will) consider myself an “idiot” in the face of all the majesty of the sky, my posts will always be in “Idiot’s Guide” fashion. An ephemeris is the assigned place of something in the sky. The things I am concerned with: Firstly, the sun. Secondly, the moon. Reminds me of a fortune cookie I once received.

So yeah, that’s that. The Sun, the Moon, and Time. I can control all that, yes. Because, really, that is what astrophotography kind of is—the harnessing of time and celestial entities. (Isn’t that what all life is?) But for my intent and purpose: I’m just a girl standing in front of the sky, asking it to give me as much darkness as possible. So first I’m going to ask websites for some stuff. So take a trip with me into… the Twilight Zone.

There are three different twilight periods to be aware of when planning a shoot. Though celestial stuff can be visible during any time of the day, “Night” is the place where you’ll have the most deep darkness as the sun drops below the horizon beyond 18 degrees, as illustrated nicely in the graph over there. Since the night of my shoot is shared by two dates, I used these nifty graphs from this page, combining them to span the overnight.

Then I thought about the moon. On the night of peak Perseid activity, there will be a Waxing gibbous, a big bright moon. Which kind of stinks. But the moon does set at some point. I asked the internet when and it told me. There will be about an hour of total darkness, free from the sun and the moon’s light. Though I will be shooting the sky throughout the twilights and while the moon is blazing, it will be this hour of darkness I set my remote shutter to automatically shoot continuously while I do other things: sit back in a chair, sleep, etc. I’ll talk slightly more about this in the “equipment” section below. Here is the graphic I made with the darkness breakdown.

I learned of a great app for astrophotographers: The Photographer’s Ephemeris. It makes finding what I described above easy. And there are many other capabilities I’ll try to learn more about.

Of course all of this research and preparation will be a bust if the night isn’t clear. So it would be checking this GetOutcast and Clear Sky Chart constantly in advance of trip.

Preparation: Equipment Tweaks

Some equipment-related tweaks would be made this time in my continuation of my Beginner’s Guide to astrophotography. In no particular order:

I will dim the LCD screen of my camera! Duh! Why hadn’t I done this before? This light is bright enough to impede complete adjustment to the night sky and I don’t want to miss any movement up there. (Here is a whole article on the subject if you would like to deconstruct the obvious.) I will utilize the red screens about Cherry Springs as I will need an app to confirm location of Perseus.

I’ll sandbag my tripod. I have a relatively light (read: cheap) tripod. This time I will add sand to a drawstring bag and secure on its center hook so the elements do not disturb it as much. And I have plenty of sand and gravel from teaching STEM this summer.

I’d use a remote shutter to minimize the movement of the camera. Since the settings for night shoots are more static and the exposure long, I don’t need to be hunching over my display screen the whole time. The Pixel TW-283/DC2 LCD Wireless Shutter Release Timer Remote Control has been proven to be such an amazing value since I used it for the Total Eclipse. And now that my skills have increased greatly since just two years ago, I look forward to the Total Eclipse of 2024, which is supposed to be even better. I plan on going to Texas to watch the Eclipse’s totality. On April 8th, one of my favorite Neutral Milk Hotel songs.

With the same tool I will program my device to automatically photograph in regular intervals. I am thinking I will do a picture every 25-30 seconds for the hour of the darkest sky. Since I have never used this feature, this post contains details of my test run. Setting the timer was so much easier using the video below.

My test considered whether I would need another a new memory card for the quantity of pictures I will be taking, whether fresh batteries will be adequate, and how to set and initiate the remote interval.

My trial was to test the sequence settings I will use for the meteor shower, even though here in New York City the shots would be way over-exposed with light. That is okay. The goal was to see the timing and memory/battery life concerns of the actual shoot. Since I did manage to get some pretty images during my test (detailed below for my and others’ reference), I have compiled the resulting 120 images into my very first time lapse video! (Thank you, YouTube photographer guy, for this very helpful tutorial!)

This is how I set the timer feature on the The Pixel TW-283/DC2 LCD Wireless Shutter Release Timer Remote Control:

Delay: 5 (seconds, time from start of “play” button to start of sequence)
Long: 25 (seconds, exposure time)
Interval: 1 (second, time between pictures)
N1: 60 (times sequence will repeat)
Interval between Repeat: 1 (second, time between repeat of sequence)
Repeat sequence: 2 (number of times sequence will run)

This resulted in 120 pictures. It took 51 minutes from the start to end of the 2nd sequence. Battery was still at full at the end. I replaced triple AAA batteries in remote receiver before the start of sequence and it was fine. I would switch out a new set on the day of just to be safe.

My second trial will consider appropriately exposed images and allow me to play a little with post-production. I decided on trying to capture vehicle lights from both sides of the BQE from an pedestrian overpass and make a composite image of the resulting shots, perhaps using an application called StarStaX. That’ll be on this week’s “to do.” Meanwhile, this 4 second time lapse. Again, way over-exposed but you can see some stars and the clouds move through time.

StarStaX stacks images to create star trail images, though this is also possible in PhotoShop, where I did my time lapse of trial pictures. Since this is a meteor shower, it could come out really neat! Here is an example of the motion you could catch.

Can’t wait for the Shower. Meanwhile, check out my new page where I compile all my astrophotography stuff for easy reference!