As many of you may know the end of the first week of August brings the Perseid meteor shower. The peak should be on Saturday and without surprise and right on target it will rain that day. Fortunately the meteor shower is a long event, at least from Friday until Sunday and beyond. Since the ZHR (zenith hourly rate) is quite high (50 – 100 meteors per hour) there should be something to see if the sky is clear enough. Local light pollution would be severe enough to miss at least half of the meteors, perhaps even more will go unnoticed unless you may some effort to get to a darker location. A 90 minute drive away from the city should do it. If that is beyond your ken then at least find some quiet concession road and a farmer's field that gives you a NW view of the night sky.
Still, I’m wondering if anyone on this forum is planning to take some photos of this meteor shower. A full-frame sensor is better for this sort of thing due to its cleaner performance at high sensitivity settings and also because a wide angle lens will have a wider field-of-view. If light pollution remains an issue then you don't need to crank the ISO beyond 400 and even a cropped sensor performs well at that setting. If your location is really secluded and dark you can crank the ISO to at least 1600, and even 3200.
It is advisable to use the fastest wide angle lens you own. F2.8 or faster is ideal. I wish I had one. Use a tripod and perhaps even boost its effective stability by keeping it short, close to the ground, and also use some weight creatively attached to your tripod with a bungee cord wrapped around any part that serves. Set your camera to RAW, disengage any noise reduction setting on your menu, set your controls to M, dial in your widest aperture, set shutter trip delay, and set to continuous shooting for as many successive frames as your camera can handle (mine can only do 10 frames at a time) and then you need to re-trip the shutter again. You will need a FULL battery and maybe even a second back-up battery. If it is really dark, far from the city, then your best ISO setting is 1600, or 3200. Closer to the city that setting will capture too much light pollution, so dial it down to ISO 400.
If you are using a W/A lens then you can dial a exposure duration of 20 – 30 seconds, which will be applied to each frame. For a cropped sensor camera you better use 15 – 20 seconds per frame. Focus on a bright star, or planet manually with LIVE VIEW and use the digital zoom feature to check when the star point is sharpest and take a test shot. Turn down the intensity of your view screen. Chimp the image to make sure it is indeed well-focused, If not, try again. Some processing will be needed afterwards in whatever program you are familiar with. Don’t shoot in jpg! The image will not be as good and the camera will be too busy compressing stuff when it should be doing other things. A RAW file will capture a lot more detail, which will only be revealed after processing when the extra data can be mined and put on display. Point your “focused” wide angle lens in the NE sky in the direction of the constellation Perseus. Trip your shutter, wait for the delay, count the number of frames of 20 sec exposures until you hit your limit and then trip the shutter again. Rinse and repeat. Hopefully some meteor trails will have been captured in some of the exposures. BTW, Perseus is not really well above the NE horizon until after midnight, or better yet, in the wee small hours of the morning (Sinatra) because the higher it is the darker the sky.
If your planning to try it maybe you should send a request to Charline for how-to tips since she seems to be able to do this kind of stuff while also reading Ulysses and meditating on multi-dimensional space-time. Then again, we haven’t heard from her for quite some time so perhaps she has moved on into another dimension or some higher plane of existence.
