Starship Asterisk*

Meteors along the Milky Way

Explanation: Under dark and mostly moonless night skies, many denizens of planet Earth were able to watch this year's Perseid meteor shower. Seen from a grassy hillside from Shiraz, Iran these Perseid meteors streak along the northern summer Milky Way before dawn on Sunday, August 13. Frames used to construct the composited image were captured near the active annual meteor shower's peak between 02:00 AM and 04:30 AM local time. Not in this night skyscape, the shower's radiant in the heroic constellation Perseus is far above the camera's field of view. But fans of northern summer nights can still spot a familiar asterism. Formed by bright stars Deneb, Vega, and Altair, the Summer Triangle spans the luminous band of the Milky Way.

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Man that's something! Scenes like this meteor shower make me think I happen to live in the wrong part of the world. When I go out to watch during almost peak times at 1:00 AM, in relatively dark skies on a farm, I might see 2 or even 3 at the same time or within a 3 or 5 seconds time period, but never once have I seen a couple dozen at the same time like that, that they actually look like their name sake a shower!

A pity that Deneb, Vega and Altair aren't identified when one moves the cursor over the image.

De58te wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2023 10:59 am Man that's something! Scenes like this meteor shower make me think I happen to live in the wrong part of the world. When I go out to watch during almost peak times at 1:00 AM, in relatively dark skies on a farm, I might see 2 or even 3 at the same time or within a 3 or 5 seconds time period, but never once have I seen a couple dozen at the same time like that, that they actually look like their name sake a shower!

Doesn't matter what part of the world you live in. The show is about the same from anyplace with reasonably dark skies. This image shows 2.5 hours of meteors in a single frame. Of course it looks impressive!

Here's what I got on my camera watching the entire night, and covering the entire sky!
_

a lot of beautiful photos in this APOD! I can't show them all; here
are a couple of them! Kudos to APOD!

Friends all over the world shared my feeling that this one was a bust. I didn’t make it all the way till 4, but from 12-2, I spotted only a handful per hour, even from a very dark position.

When I was a kid, meteor showers were spectacular! These skies today……..

Hopalong wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2023 12:19 pm A pity that Deneb, Vega and Altair aren't identified when one moves the cursor over the image.

Yes, but at least we got a link - can still spot

Jim Leff wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2023 6:28 pm Friends all over the world shared my feeling that this one was a bust. I didn’t make it all the way till 4, but from 12-2, I spotted only a handful per hour, even from a very dark position.

When I was a kid, meteor showers were spectacular! These skies today……..

Objectively, in terms of the ZHR and the magnitude spread, this year was very typical of other Perseid showers over the last 22 years where Moon interference was low.

But it's true that fewer people now have dark skies to observe under.

Does it seem odd that all these 'meteors' look relatively the same? Same direction; mostly the same length. The night I observed, they came from the same general direction but some were slow and were more radially coming at me with some that were appearing in random directions.

Chris , did you end up using software to find the meteors and stack them? I ended up writing code that kind of worked but of course was dominated with planes.

JoeP wrote: ↑Fri Aug 25, 2023 1:47 pm Does it seem odd that all these 'meteors' look relatively the same? Same direction; mostly the same length. The night I observed, they came from the same general direction but some were slow and were more radially coming at me with some that were appearing in random directions.

Same direction makes perfect sense, as they all point back to the radiant, which is in the Milky way on the opposite side of the sky. We can see here that the trails aren't quite parallel, but converge on a vanishing point outside the frame. We're seeing a fairly narrow FOV here, quite unlike when we're out observing a shower.

There were several active showers, but the Perseids were the dominant one, so it's possible no non-Perseids were in this field over the 2.5 hours of exposures. Or, non-Perseids may simply not have been included in the final stack.

The uniformity of length isn't too unreasonable. Trail length is very dependent on distance from the radiant, with trails getting longer as the meteor is farther from the radiant. Over this fairly small section of sky, we might see most meteors having similar trail lengths.

daddyo wrote: ↑Fri Aug 25, 2023 4:53 pm Chris , did you end up using software to find the meteors and stack them? I ended up writing code that kind of worked but of course was dominated with planes.

My meteor cameras collect video real time and evaluate for meteor-like motion, saving frames from three before detection to three after. So I end up with a bunch of short videos. All I do is scan through them and eliminate the planes or birds that created false alarms, leaving me with meteors only. I can just stack those in Photoshop to make composites like the one above.