Leonids Meteor Shower Tonight

[Seapy]

Leonids peak morning is on 18th.

Leonid meteor shower is expected to be at its best in the predawn hours on Sunday, November 18, 2018 long after the moon has set.

Planning an overnight vigil on the shores of Coniston Water. D3 and D300S in the hopes of an eventful night, good weather is forecast.

[Birna Rørslett]

Keep fingers crossed for clear skies

[CS]

Keep fingers crossed for clear skies

Or course that would mean that whatever is out there would also have a clear view of us! 

[Øivind Tøien]

It does not look good here according to the Weather Service and the excellent Canadian Astrospheric App.

I have seen about one rather intense meteor/fireball per evening of tracking here lately, actually quite impressive, but nothing recorded on camera. I am not sure of their origin.

[Akira]

It is daytime here and cloudy.   

Hope you would share some results, Robert!

[Seapy]

Well I just walked staggered in. Need to unload the cards, has been a busy night.

On our way out to the proposed location we encountered a strange man wearing a white tight fitting shirt and black tights, walking along the central white line of a very busy main road, death wish or what?  Am about to check out the dash-cam to see if I got any video of him...

Will check back in when I have been through the images and video.  Oh, also got the sunrise.

[Seapy]

Well it was a lovely, if cool night, barely a cloud in the sky and no mist.

Having caught up with some sleep I have had a look at the images from the D3 and processed a couple, the first one from Coniston Water, taken by the Bluebird Café on the shore, view to the South.  This one of the very few with a meteor, a very strange one, I don't understand the bright blob along the streak unless it collided with something?

The lights to the left are Brantwood, John Ruskin's home. http://www.brantwood.org.uk/about-brantwood/

The water very close in to the shore was mirror smooth, with a very slight swell, which distorted the reflections of the stars slightly. Taken at 05:04 Hrs GMT.

D3, Nikkor Fisheye 16mm f/2.8, 20 seconds @ f/2.8, ISO3200 40% de-fished in Lightroom.



The second image taken on the Leven and Crake estuary (The River Leven drains Lake Windermere and the Crake drains Coniston Water.) just after dawn, 08:00 hrs GMT.  An HDR image from 7 frames.

D3, Nikkor 20mm f/2.8D 1/1600 second @ f/8 ISO200



As for the strange line walker, I found his picture on my dash-cam...

[Jakov Minić]

Amazing night shot, Robert!

[Akira]

Robert, thank you for sharing marvellous images!

In the image #1, you seem to have captured a so-called "fireball"?  Really nice!

[Seapy]

Thank you Jakov and Akira, It was a good night, very enjoyable.  I have many more but not sufficiently 'different' to warrant posting I don't think...  I just set the intervalometer and hope!

Mind you, I haven't looked at the D300S images yet.

I  am varying my technique a little, not pushing beyond ISO 3200 in camera and keeping the exposure time down to 20 seconds max, I seem to be getting more keepers that way and the files still have enough room to push them in pp.

[Øivind Tøien]

Really great night shot Robert!  It must have been beautiful being out there! Would you mind posting a 100% crop of the area around the meteor? How did the frame afterwords look - any signs of smoke trails when zooming in to the frames?

Some holes in the clouds happened to open up here, so I had the D7100 out for 1 3/4 hour with 28mm AIS at f/3.2, 10 sec exposures at ISO 1600 due to the light pollution. However a couple of scans though the 400 frames showed no meteors caught on camera, and none were seen while out setting up and checking. As our time zone is 9 hours behind may be we were beyond the peak.

[Erik Lund]

Beautiful night scene! Very nicely post processing

[ianwatson]

Not just beautiful, it is breathtaking!

[Seapy]

Really great night shot Robert!  It must have been beautiful being out there! Would you mind posting a 100% crop of the area around the meteor? How did the frame afterwords look - any signs of smoke trails when zooming in to the frames?

OK Øivind,  many thanks for the kind words, you have opened a can of worms I wasn't expecting...

Firstly using artistic licence... That meteor was not captured at that time, or location.  It was captured later the same morning in the estuary set.

However, since you asked me to show the immediately succeeding frames I took a careful look and was somewhat amazed to find the same meteor seems to continue to be visible over 9 frames.  The intervalometer was I think set with a five second interval between exposures and the exposures were for 15 seconds, The time of the first exposure file is 07:10:28, the final file timestamp is 07:13:08.  By my calculations an elapsed time of 2 minutes 40 seconds.

Could this have been an 'Earth grazer?  I haven't yet layered the exposures but they *seem* to be aligned, they definitely look that way.  I will layer them in Ps and check the alignment.  Given the scarcity of meteors Saturday night I can't see them all being different meteors following the same path.

I will post images a little later once I have had chance to prepare them.

For now the first true image in the set.

D3 + Nikkor 20mm f/2.8, 15 seconds @ f/4.0 ISO 3200

[Seapy]

Beautiful night scene! Very nicely post processing

Thank you Erik, as usual these jaunts don't always take me where I expect!

Not just beautiful, it is breathtaking!

Thank you for the kind words Ian, a more skilled photographer would probably been able to capture even more beauty than I did, there were Swans , Ducks and Geese swimming around but exposing for them too was too much for me...