Welcome to Part 2 of our three-day journey through the how-to of photographing meteor showers:
“Using PhotoPills to Scout Meteor Showers,” by Chris Nicholson
“How to Photograph a Meteor Shower,” by Matt Hill
“How to Process a Meteor Shower Radiant,” by Matt Hill
All of this, plus a guide to gear and a guide to shoot locations, is contained in our brand new PDF e-guide, Great Balls of Fire: A Guide to Photographing Meteor Showers. To download the whole e-guide, click here:
How to Photograph a Meteor Shower
Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado. Nikon D750 with a Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8 lens. 17 images at 22 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400, plus a single foreground exposure at 382 seconds, ISO 2000.
It’s amazing to capture a meteor. An accomplishment that makes most of us say, “Yeah!” and fist-pump in the air. But you know what’s even better? Lots of meteors. And all of them zooming out of one spot in the sky.
One meteor can often be problematic, compositionally. One looks like just a bright streak going through the frame, brighter than a plane trail, usually not in a pleasing spot along a line of thirds or along a swirl of the golden spiral. But many meteors all emanating from one place in the heavens? Wow!
So get your biggest memory card(s) and format them, because this could be a lot of photos!
Let’s assume:
you know where the radiant is, because you used PhotoPills
you choose a night that has favorable sky conditions (I love the Wunderground app)
Let’s also assume you have the following:
a high ISO-capable DSLR or mirrorless camera
freshly charged batteries or an external battery pack such as the TetherTools Case Relay
a reliable tripod
an intervalometer or a camera with one built in
You are now ready.
The Scenario
Our Great Sand Dunes group shooting the shooting stars.
Location
I am going to use a workshop shoot in Great Sand Dunes National Park to illustrate the process. The park is north of Alamosa, Colorado, which unfortunately is a source of light pollution. But the northern view into the crook of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is not only ripe with dark skies, but also offers a beautiful visual contrast between the top of the dunes at 8,660 feet and the mountains at 12,000.
Having visited Great Sand Dunes twice before, I had performed a fair amount of both daytime and nighttime scouting. The first time I failed, and the second I fared much better. This would be the third trip, and the shot I had in mind was rather epic.
Meteor Shower
The peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower on the overnight of August 12 to 13, 2017.
Sky Conditions
We had peak darkness from about 9:30 p.m. until just before 11 p.m. when the moon started to rise behind the mountains and brighten the sky.
Challenges
Ascending 600 feet of sand dunes at 8,000 feet of elevation, with gear, to achieve the view of the mountains over the dunes. Plus the patience to wait out the meteors.
A lucky first shot. Nikon D750 with a Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8 lens. 22 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.
Setting Up
I chose a 15mm lens and a vertical orientation for the camera to keep the composition ratio to one-third landscape/dunes and two-thirds sky.
When deciding on a composition, it’s important to confirm the location of the meteor radiant—the place in the sky where all the meteors appear to originate from. The radiant is always near a constellation (not by magic—only because human imagination has seen and named a lot of constellations, so there’s always one nearby). A meteor shower is named for the constellation near its radiant. The Perseids are named such because the meteors appear to originate from the constellation Perseus.
In 2017 PhotoPills didn’t have the Meteor Showers feature, so we did it the old fashioned way: We used an astronomy app to spot Perseus and to see how it would appear to move during the shoot. We set up our cameras facing the direction of the meteor shower radiant, keeping in mind that it would move through the frame (like the rest of the night sky) over the course of the evening.
In Chris’ post yesterday, he walked through how we would have used PhotoPills to plan this photo. In short, here’s the info I would have loved to have at our fingertips that night three years ago:
From left to right: Path of the meteor radiant, plus moon shadow angles and times. The same, plus the Milky Way. Nearing the end of a usable dark sky. Moonrise—the end of the shoot … or not?
I placed the radiant near the center of my composition. Again, constellations appear to move during the night, which means the radiant center travels through your composition. So definitely plan for that movement. If you are not careful, the radiant may drift out of your frame. Fortunately, the Perseids are located not too far from Polaris. So, from the earthbound point of view, everything was pretty much rotating around a close fixed point, making shooting (and later, post-processing) easier.
I chose to include a generous portion of sky to maximize meteor captures, plus some of the landscape for context. My framing deliberately included some featureless foreground: the utterly dark dunes. We encouraged everyone in the workshop shooting with us to stay behind a line in the sand (so to speak) so as not to get footprints in others’ foregrounds.
The foreground is dark—but we’ll deal with that later.
You may ask, “If the foreground is dark, why are you including so much of it?” Well, it’s awfully hard to see meteors when the moon is in the sky. That causes an opposite problem: dark landscapes. But we still, ideally, want our images to have artful foreground that provides both context and rich details.
How do we do that? We have a few choices:
Set up during the end of the day and shoot some twilight images. Then, do not move your camera. Not a millimeter. When darkness descends, shoot your meteor shower images and blend them with your daylit foreground in post.
Light paint your foreground for the beginning and end frames of your meteor shower sequence. In post, blend your best light painting with your meteor radiant.
Wait for the moon to scoot around and light up the landscape from a right angle. This is what I chose, and I urged the attendees to do this too. It takes patience. But knowing your goal helps.
No matter what, be sure to give your skies some context and plan for your foreground to be composed and lit well.
Setting Up the Rest
OK. Next we do the bread-and-butter night photography stuff:
Focus.
Compose.
Perform a high ISO test.
Check everything at 100 percent on the back of your camera. Carefully. Especially look at your focus. Four times. Not joking.
Make sure your camera is set to capture in RAW.
Lock down everything on your tripod.
Put a fresh battery in your camera, or plug in to an external battery.
Determine a good shutter speed using the NPF Rule. (More on that later.)
Choose an ISO that complements the scene and your camera. For my Nikon Z 6, it’s usually ISO 6400, but I know Gabe really digs pushing that camera to 12,800.
Shoot as wide open as your lens permits without coma.
Connect your intervalometer and set its program as needed. Your interval between images should be 1 second, which is as short as almost any intervalometer can effectively go.
Shooting for Sharp Stars
Why is the shutter speed so important? You want to have exposure times that create star points, not short star smudges. Your sky should be tack-sharp, so I suggest calculating a shutter speed using the NPF Rule.
But when you do, calculate the ideal NPF exposure in PhotoPills using “Default,” but not “Accurate.” For example, these days I often shoot with a Nikon Z 6 and a Laowa 15mm f/2.8 lens. When I run that combination through the NPF calculator, the “Default” shutter speed is 18.62 seconds, while “Accurate” is 9.31 seconds.
A 9.31-second exposure will create amazingly sharp starts, but it is also short enough to increase the chance of cutting off meter tails. 9.31 seconds + 1 second delay in the intervalometer = 10.31-second exposure cycles. That means the shutter will be closed for 9.7 percent of the total exposure time of the final composite image.
An 18.62-second exposure is more likely to capture a meteor in its entirety—its blackout time during intervals will account for only 5.2 percent of the cumulative exposure of the series. I like those odds better.
NPF Rule shutter speeds for the Nikon Z 6 when used with a Laowa 15mm f/2.8 lens, at the “Default” (left) and “Accurate” (right) settings. (Forget about the 500 Rule. It’s two generations old—enough to consider obsolete.)
You might decide that you don’t mind missing a few meteors because you want to make a magnificent mural print for your wall and the pointier stars will look better when blown up. I would agree. But photography is always a game of deciding which variables to adjust to match your goals. My goal was maximum meteor strikes.
Also consider this: You might capture only 10, 20 or 40 meteors in hundreds of photos over a few hours of shooting. My final in this example has only 16 meteors originating from the radiant. Shooting at 9.31 seconds, with more frequent 1-second intervals, may have reduced that count by quite a few.
The Shoot
So now what?
Set your intervalometer (or camera software or app) to start a sequence of images that begins right after twilight ends (or right when the meteor shower starts to pick up). Also, base your start time around when the moon might be rising or setting, if applicable. In my case, in Great Sand Dunes, I wanted to keep shooting until a little after the moon rose at 11:04 p.m.
If you want to run your exposures until dawn, I suggest returning to your camera during twilight to adjust your exposures manually as the sun approaches the horizon, because they will change quickly. But consider this: Why should the foreground look like daytime when meteors are visible only on the darkest of nights?
Go! Let it rip. Don’t move the camera. Don’t walk in front of it. Maybe light paint the first few exposures. But then sit back (maybe on a portable chair) and enjoy the meteor shower with your naked eyes or go for a safe hike in the darkness.
Waiting out the long series of exposures.
At Great Sand Dunes, I let the exposures run for just over two hours. Yup. Made 325 RAW files. For a wedding photographer, that’s no big deal, but for a night photographer, that might usually be three or four night’s work.
I put together the 325 images in a time lapse, so you can see (in an accelerated way) how the meteor shower looked in person:
Patience pays off. Moonlight sculpts the dunes for my lit-foreground frame. Nikon D750 with a Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8 lens. 382 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 2000.
Foreground Exposure
My final step was to expose for the moonlit foreground and mix in some light painting.
I wanted the moon to be scraping over the dunes perpendicular to my scene. As soon as the moon was about to do what I wanted to capture, I stopped the intervalometer to cease the meteor series. I quickly shot another high ISO test to determine a good exposure, then dropped down to ISO 2000 and made a 382-second frame for a higher-quality image of the sand.
I didn’t choose to make an even longer, even higher-quality exposure because the moon, and thus the shadows, were moving quickly, which made the dunes look flat. I could have also walked into or around the scene and performed some artful light painting to accent the landscape, but I liked how the moonlight looked, so I packed up the setup and moved on for the night.
Post-Production
Congratulations! You photographed a whole meteor shower! Believe it or not, that was the easy part. Now you have to process it. … Buckle up! Tomorrow we go to the digital darkroom.
Now move on to “How to Process a Meteor Shower Radiant.” And be sure to download the e-book, Great Balls of Fire: A Guide to Photographing Meteor Showers.
