20 October 2009

Orionid Meteor Shower Tonight

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For those who love getting up really early the Orionid Meteor Shower will be streaking across the sky tonight. I’m told they’ll be hitting their peak around 4-5AM tomorrow (Wednesday) morning as the Earth runs trhough the debris left behind by Halley’s Comet. No telescope is required to look up in the sky and see 10-20 meteors per hour. They’ll be around on Thursday and Friday mornings as well.

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I ended up near Wamboin and got a few reasonable shots. The light glow from Canberra was still visible to the west, but since the Orionids were East-North-East the sky was plenty dark and there were quite a few, though not spectacular meteors. Didn’t manage to capture any though.

As for camera settings, I was running a 7D with a 17-85mm lens, not wide enough, but sharper than my 10-22mm ultra-wide which I’ll try next outing and see how it turns out. The 7D’s sensor is all new-fangled and completely brilliant for low-light shots, so I was running higher than 200 ISO. If you really want to catch a meteor, I’d recommend something like Canon’s TC-80N3 Timer Remote Controller. A bit steep at $300, but it’ll continuously take long exposures at any given interval. This way you can set & forget knowing that you’ve got a pretty much continuous coverage of that window of sky, and if anything flashes across it, you’ll catch it. I hear there are cheaper versions on e-bay, but I’ve had bad experiences with generic accessories before, so I’ll pay extra for the genuine article.

Minor write-up and sample pics at 7DZilla.blogspot.com =)

UrbanReality6:32 pm 21 Oct 09

I was outside for around 2 hours (2.30am – 4.30am), saw around 15 or so meteor’s with the naked eye. It was quite nice.

Hellspice, tripod, away from the city i.e. orroral valley, honeysuckle, Lake george if you’re north, f3.5/5.6 on bulb setting iso 200 – Start from about 1 minute exxposures and see what happens.

Probably good to get a horizon in there too, for some point of reference…so a wiiiide angle lens would be best

a tripod and a reasonably long exposure would be the trick i would think, although not to long something you would have to play with depending on your cameras capabilities.

oh and given its wed a time machine 🙁 wish id known about it.

any photographers care to share what settings might be good for taking photos of this ?

How was it?

UrbanReality1:44 am 21 Oct 09

Thanks for the heads up! Should be interesting.

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