Nice Long-trail Meteor

To all,

I saw this spectacular meteor visually. I must have said "WOW" three or four times as it continued to brighten and finally double flashed in the end. I was excited I captured it on the fish-eye lens, but disappointed the shutter closed midpoint on the camera with the 28mm lens. It would have been one of my best captures ever, but spoiled by a premature shutter closure. We need to find a way to tell the camera not to close the shutter while a phenomenal meteor is in progress. :-D This may have been a Leonid earth-grazer, but it seemed too slow. Who knows. It was awesome nevertheless.

Wade


Nice long-trail meteor




Premature shutter closure

Hi!

You might have to run 2 cameras in an overlapping way to prevent such 'problems'. There is a device which could do that: https://www.doc-diy.net/photo/smatrig/ That might be a good idea if you expect earth grazers in the field of view.

Well, I prefer using 2 cameras in a partially overlapping panorama mode, shooting at the same time.

nighthiker,

nighthiker said:

Hi!

You might have to run 2 cameras in an overlapping way to prevent such 'problems'. There is a device which could do that: https://www.doc-diy.net/photo/smatrig/ That might be a good idea if you expect earth grazers in the field of view.

Click to expand...

I do this as well, but I typically only have about 20-30 degrees of overlap which means I still would have missed this one. :-( In general, it is a great way to hedge your chances of capturing meteors during the down time in the overlapping area. I generally like to leave about a 1-2 second time gap between them to enhance the chance of capturing those sneaky meteors trying to time their arrival in the "blind time" of the cameras. One caution though, I've seen through the night the cameras get in sync with one another so I have to readjust their timing.

Wade

t_wade said:

To all,

I saw this spectacular meteor visually. I must have said "WOW" three or four times as it continued to brighten and finally double flashed in the end. I was excited I captured it on the fish-eye lens, but disappointed the shutter closed midpoint on the camera with the 28mm lens. It would have been one of my best captures ever, but spoiled by a premature shutter closure. We need to find a way to tell the camera not to close the shutter while a phenomenal meteor is in progress. :-D This may have been a Leonid earth-grazer, but it seemed too slow. Who knows. It was awesome nevertheless.

Wade


Nice long-trail meteor


Premature shutter closure

Click to expand...

Wade,

Just the way you described your reaction to this event is enough to make me think it was a "modest" Leonid grazer. I remember a similar reaction to many of the grazers that preceded the Leonid storm of 2001!

While the majority elicited "wows" from the observers that were gathered that night, there was a small proportion of extreme grazers - borderline fireball magnitude, and they just kept going, and going, turning from bright green, to yellow, to orange, and then they just got reder and reder before finally disappearing. I have never seen such a truly deep red in a meteor before! ..these "super grazers" just left everyone speechless/with jaws on the floor.. well at least in my case!

For me the grazers were the best part of the night.

--
Leo S.

Leo,

1DSmII said:

Just the way you described your reaction to this event is enough to make me think it was a "modest" Leonid grazer. I remember a similar reaction to many of the grazers that preceded the Leonid storm of 2001!

While the majority elicited "wows" from the observers that were gathered that night, there was a small proportion of extreme grazers - borderline fireball magnitude, and they just kept going, and going, turning from bright green, to yellow, to orange, and then they just got reder and reder before finally disappearing. I have never seen such a truly deep red in a meteor before! ..these "super grazers" just left everyone speechless/with jaws on the floor.. well at least in my case!

For me the grazers were the best part of the night.

Click to expand...

It must have been a Leonid earth-grazer as you described its behavior perfectly. I sure wish I would have captured it fully in the 28mm. I probably would have had it printed. It was such an amazing experience. Hopefully, the next return of Comet Temple-Tuttle in the early to mid 2030s will produce some memorable Earth-grazers that I capture in full with my awesome futuristic 28mm f/1.0 lens that filters out all the annoying satellites that will be visible. ;-)

Wade

t_wade said:

Leo,

t_wade said:

Just the way you described your reaction to this event is enough to make me think it was a "modest" Leonid grazer. I remember a similar reaction to many of the grazers that preceded the Leonid storm of 2001!

While the majority elicited "wows" from the observers that were gathered that night, there was a small proportion of extreme grazers - borderline fireball magnitude, and they just kept going, and going, turning from bright green, to yellow, to orange, and then they just got reder and reder before finally disappearing. I have never seen such a truly deep red in a meteor before! ..these "super grazers" just left everyone speechless/with jaws on the floor.. well at least in my case!

For me the grazers were the best part of the night.

Click to expand...

It must have been a Leonid earth-grazer as you described its behavior perfectly. I sure wish I would have captured it fully in the 28mm. I probably would have had it printed. It was such an amazing experience. Hopefully, the next return of Comet Temple-Tuttle in the early to mid 2030s will produce some memorable Earth-grazers that I capture in full with my awesome futuristic 28mm f/1.0 lens that filters out all the annoying satellites that will be visible. ;-)

Wade

Click to expand...

I saw some spectacular Leonid grazers in 2005, which was not a very large outburst (compared with the recent storms at least), so perhaps we will get more opportunities to catch some in around a decade's time, if not sooner.

I was lusting over the idea of super-fast wide lenses for some time, but with an a7s type camera recording footage, F1.4 is good enough, especially at a dark sky site where you can really push the ISO.

I am wondering though, if super-fast lenses combined with long exposures are really that good an idea - but perhaps I'm overthinking this: Unless you are somewhere extremely dark, you are not going to be able to expose for very long, if you want to preserve contrast between sky and meteor. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this, and why it could be problematic!

Super short exposures, like those made when recording footage, seem more suited to super-fast lenses!

Hi!

At least Canon cameras trigger a connected camera once they are connected. I use a simple remote timer with a splinter for two cameras and usually shoot synchro with a 2 sec delay. The full-electronic shutter would allow for a much shorter delay, but the 'rolling shutter' should be a show-stopper for the fast meteors. Once the cameras are connected I can also trigger the other camera by manually pressing one shutter.

The best option is always to set up as many cameras as possible for the meteor photography.