“Meteor showers are marvelous sights, as myriads of stargazers found out a week ago. But seeing them can sometimes be inconvenient. To get the best view, you have to go far from city lights and stay up until the wee hours of the morning. The ideal situation would be to camp out in a beautiful location like California’s Joshua Tree National Park and keep your eyes open all night.
That’s exactly what photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee did last week. He set up his camera in the park for two nights around the peak of the Perseid meteor shower (Aug. 12 and 15), took a series of exposures, and spliced them together artfully into a multi-day time-lapse sequence. The result makes it seem as if the meteors are popping like fireworks amid the multitudes of stars in the Milky Way … two nights’ worth in just a little more than minute. But not all of the flashes you see are shooting stars.
“I did catch some airplanes,” Lee told me today. The streaks that appear to move across the sky are more likely nighttime airplane transits rather than meteors. But there’s a killer meteor flash that pops up around the 30-second mark, leaving a little wisp of vapor in its wake.”
Read more at Cosmic Log (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
so awesome
I fell asleep on the sofa two days running after promising to treat myself to a walk in the park and some Perseid action. Gutted.
This film goes a small way to making up for it.
I haven’t seen a decent meteor shower since I was in Thailand.
I would love to show the kids some shooting stars so a camping holiday in France may be in order – must check the dates…
Heh, I blogged with the same video last week.
I went down to the Galloway Forest Park Dark Sky Reserve in Scotland and was rewarded with some fantastic views of the Perseids but it is really spectacular seeing things condensed.
I live within two hours of Joshua Tree, but didn’t see the shower (city lights interferred!). Thank you for posting this excellent video. There are very few places as serene and majestic as the deserts of America’s southwest.
Wow, that is an amazing video. I’ve never seen the night / early morning sky look like that being that I live in the city. It just made it that much obvious that earth is just a floating rock in the great big “sea” that is our milky way galaxy and ultimately our universe.