Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Geminids!



My 15 seconds of fame . . .

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



And an APOD!

10 comments:

Laurie said...

Saw your photograph on NBC nightly news........BEAUTIFUL!!!! Thanks for sharing with the nation...L.

Paul said...

Very nice, David, very nice. And that piece from NBC News was almost exactly 15 seconds! And to think, you matriculated right here at this fine institution and still turned out okay. :)

Dean said...

I got it at about 16.5, so better than the average 15 seconds! Very nice effort - I noticed that the shot Brian showed is different from the one on your blog - what's with that? You're just drawing those in randomly anyway, aren't you??? -Dean

Unknown said...

Dean - indeed - the image above was taken two hours later then the one I sent to MSNBC and consists of 13 summed images instead of the six used in the earlier image. I sent MSNBC both images - but I guess they used the first one instead of the second. As for the reality of it all - they are all real meteors - in the observed place in the sky - just time compressed. But you already knew that I'm sure.

Jim said...

Beautiful shot Dave & congrats for making the NBC news! And to think I knew you before you were famous....

Paul said...

David, congrats on the APOD! Well done, Sir, well done.

Melinda said...

Very nice.... =)

Unknown said...

You made APOD, today, too

sturat said...

Great image. But, could you indulge me (and others?) with some technical background?

I understand that you're building up the final image from a stack of exposures. What focal length and exposure time are you using for each?

What I don't understand is how you get a minimum of star trails without registering the stacks on the stars. But, that would make the foreground shift also.

So, what am I missing?

Thanks,

Unknown said...

Sturat:

To answer your questions - the camera was attached to an equatorial mount that was compensating for the Earth's rotation - thus the stars (and meteor trails) stayed registered in the same place in the camera's field of view throughout the 2 hours of exposures (450 images in all).

Indeed, if the images were composited in total for all frames, there would be multiple images of the foreground as it rotated during the two hours of exposures - however this would have been aesthetically chaotic and rather odd looking. Therefore, I chose one of the thirteen images that best showed the domes and foreground and masked out the foreground in all the other images using photoshop. The meteors were already registered on the sky because of the tracking mount so no modification of the sky/meteor trails was necessary. The real work lay in culling through the 450 images for those that contained meteors - only 13 out of 450!

Equipment used was a Canon EOS 1D Mark IIN body and a Canon EF 16-35mm F/2.8L zoom lens @ 16mm and F/2.8. ISO was set at 3200.