The meteor showers are debris of comets in the size of peanuts falling into earths atmosphere, as a consequences of earth passing through the dusty trails left by comets. They seems to be falling from a specific position of sky depends on the dust trails from different comets. Here is how to watch them. All we need to find is the radiant point. Radiant point is where the meteor showers seems to be originating from. For different meteor showers the names are given based on which constellation the radiant point is close to.
Perseid meteor showers are one of the most popular meteor showers of the year. They are originating from the radiant point, which is close to the constellation Perseus. They are active from July 23rd to August 24th. They have a rate of 120 meteor shower per hour, but not all of those showers are visible to our eyes. The visibility depends on the size of the meteors as well as the light pollution in the area. The phase of Moon is another important factor. This year the moon is at it's waning phase. 11th and 12th of the August is the peak time of meteor shower. This time Moon is at 47% phase, this would affect the visibility of number of meteors this year. Still we will be able to get some nice views due to high number of debris left by the comet. The debris of comet Swift-Tuttle is associated with the perseid meteor shower. This comet has a period of 133 years. This comet has been filling its trails with debris which is rich enough to give us spectacular fire works forever.
The Perseid Meteors could be observed below Cassiopeia close to the head of Perseus constellation. The radiant point is marked in the picture below. Check the interactive sky map here to find where it would be in your location.
Capturing the meteor showers with your mobile or DSLRs. Its a bit tricky to capture them with a camera since we don't know when exactly they will appear in the sky. But there is a trick to it.
- A tripod is the first thing we need for capturing them.
- Find some place with less light pollution, mount your device on tripod.
- Set the camera at radiant point or the constellation Perseus.
- Use camera raw mode for taking images.
- The meteor showers are pretty quick, some of them last less than a second and some of them up to few seconds. So 5 second is a best starting point. Set exposure time to 5 second.
- Use the wide aperture and adjust the ISO for finding the best value for the exposure and aperture. It depends on the device and location.
- For DSLR a sample configuration would be ISO-400, Aperture-3.5, Shutter-5 second.
- The next step is to take picture continuously at least for an hour.
- For DSLRs there are intervalometer settings which you could set the intervals for taking pictures. Also external intervalometers could be used for taking images.
- If you are planing to stack the images its good not to touch your camera set up. So having a remote control device is good for taking photos, but not necessary.
- For mobiles we have smart watches or even selfie switches does the job as a remote controller for camera.
It's really vague steps. For more details on how to capture the meteor shower images, editing and stacking them please contact me. I will be happy to help. Thanks!
