Perseid meteor shower

[Chataignier]

It's that time of year again. Unfortunately for me, the best night in Europe will be the 12th and the forecast is heavy cloud, so I'm going out tonight which promises minimal cloud.

I dont have a fast wide angle, so I'm not terribly well equipped for this, but we'll see. 50mm f1.8 will not be wide enough on APS and 10mm f4 will be a bit slow. I will have to up the ISO and rely on de-noise.

[billtils]

🤞

[Chataignier]

Well, not the most productive of nights, but I learned a lot about working in total darkness and about the limitations of my lenses. The Canon 10-20mm f4.5 that I used with a Fringer adaptor does not show a focus scale in manual mode, so I could not select infinity. I had to focus visually on a distant object (a couple of km away, not very distant in galactic terms !) and then turn it a bit further, but it seems to have been roughly right.
Exposure 30s (500 rule : 500/16mm effective focal length) seems to have worked OK too, the stars are still round.
To get some sort of image at f4.5 and 30s I needed ISO6400 which cleaned up well with DXO DeepPrime.
At 1am there was a disappointing level of activity. I saw around 5 meteors, but only one was during an exposure and it was too faint to have recorded. The others managed to slip past in the interval between exposures - the Fuji takes around 25s to process a 30s exposure after the shutter has closed and you cant start another until it has finished - must look into why that is and see if there is a way to avoid it.
Only one image shows a clear trace and that is too uniform and too short to be a meteor, I guess I've recorded a comms satellite. Here it is, focus could be better, not very impressive !

Le voila :



It tried one or two shots with a Fuji 16-80 f4 and using the focus scale got sharper results, but the 16mm on an APS is not wide enough for this job, it misses too much of the area of interest to have much chance of seeing a meteor.

I had to stop at around 1.30am as it started to cloud over. An interesting exercise that might tempt me to look for a fast wide angle lens - an old manual lens should be affordable...