Frank - my friend and "student" and I traveled to the top of Mt. Lemmon on Saturday (several times as I forgot some crucial pieces of hardware) with a mission to photograph the Lyrid Meteor Shower. The shower is typically not a very "rich" shower - producing on average 15- 20 meteors per hour. Hardly worth staying up for. But the conditions here in Tucson were ideal - clear skies, warm (relatively for a site that is at 9,500 ft), and no moon.
I was suffering from severe CRS (Can't Remember S&*t) and forgot some mounting plates to mount the cameras to the tripod and GEM mount. Frank had to drive me back down the mountain where we met my wife and daughter who kindly agreed to meet us half way with the hardware needed. Feeling particularly exhausted due the chemo I was on - Frank helped me setup and calibrate the mount and cameras. I started the 5 hours worth of exposures at 9:30pm and went to bed - waking at 5:00am to shutdown the cameras and put them away out of the impending sunlight. My thanks goes out to Frank - a good friend and good sport.
Below are images from the two cameras of the shower a combination of the frames that showed meteors over the cameras 6 hours of integration - 30 second exposures at ISO 6400 and wide open F/2.8 and F3.5 lenses. Very few meteors were caught as apparently the shower had peaked at 5 pm local time - while it was still light out in Tucson.
