Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
I’ve had miserable results trying to shoot meteor showers so decided to try again last night with the Perseids. It was almost the dark of the moon so that would be a good thing. My past experience has been that most meteors are very dim, but I was hoping for a bright one or two. If there was one, I managed to miss it. But here are a few of the more prominent ones.
The tracker is packed for a run to a dark site tonight so I decided to shoot a set of 30 sec exposures, starting when it was dark, to make star trails and hope some good meteor trails would superimpose. But I mis-aimed and the trails were in the far LL corner, and much shorter than I expected, and I didn’t catch any that were bright compared to the stars. The peak was supposedly around 1 am our time, but it was more like 11pm to midnight.
Specific Feedback
All comments welcome!
Technical Details
Two frames with some of the stronger trails, stacked and aligned; top one in Lighten mode to superimpose all the trails. Cropped to 8% of the full frame.
Next time I’ll track and try about 100mm and try to aim more carefully – and of course then I’ll get much longer trails! And the next two “peak” nights there will be some moonlight.
Here’s a screenshot of a similar crop of about 30 min of exposures stacked to show the star trails. I didn’t darken the sky as much on this one. It was brownish in both due to light pollution.
I like the images and admire your persistance to capture the Perseids. But I wonder whether all the trails in your image are meteors. As far as I know, in a meteor shower they all seem to come from one point in the sky, the radiant. This is a perspective effect, because they move in more or less parallel tracks. The tracks in your image cross each other.
Maybe you captured some planes or satellites as well?
Glad I didn’t miss much last night, just couldn’t muster up the energy to do it! I would agree with Han, these are most assuredly satellites, most of them Starlink with the way they are cris-crossing. They are quite a stain on the night sky, at least for photographers! But I do enjoy the internet in remote places 
Interesting thought, @Han_Schutten – I’ve seen pictures of meteor trails that don’t show a well-defined radiant, but now that you’ve pointed it out, there are two crossing directions here, with the trails in each direction close to parallel. So you may well be right that this is more like two sets of those irritating Starlink satellites. I don’t know what orbits they follow. But in that case I didn’t manage to record any Perseids, and this was the time frame they were supposed to peak. I had two cameras running, one with 14mm and this one was 28mm. I looked at all the raw subs, from about 10:30 pm Pacific time until about 2:30 am, and none showed more significant tracks. It was supposed to peak about 1 am here. In that case, there are a couple of other dim tracks that might be the real thing? But the tracks in the first picture clearly taper off at the ends and bet brighter in the middle, which seems more like a meteor than a satellite. One has a sharp cutoff that would probably be at the end of the exposure.
Just saw your reply, @David_Kingham – came thru while I was typing. I had tried to center Polaris with both cameras, not knowing how long the trails would be. But the 28mm was a little off to the west. The 14mm should have covered the radiant center but it was shooting 3 min exposures, in hopes of the meteor trails being visible with star trails. I didn’t see any tracks on it, so timing was maybe off as well? I’ll try tonight with different aim – maybe there will still be some. They are said to be visible from July 17 to August 24.
