From EarthSky's meteor shower guide 2013:
The radiant is near the star Eta in the constellation Aquarius. The radiant comes over the eastern horizon at about 4 a.m. local time; that is the time at all locations across the globe. For that reason, the hour or two before dawn tends to offer the most Eta Aquarid meteors, no matter where you are on Earth. At northerly latitudes – like those in the northern U.S. and Canada, or northern Europe, for example – the meteor numbers are typically lower for this shower. In the southern half of the U.S., 10 to 20 meteors per hour might be visible in a dark sky. Farther south – for example, at latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere – the meteor numbers may increase dramatically, with perhaps two to three times more Eta Aquarid meteors streaking the southern skies. For the most part, the Eta Aquarids is a predawn shower. In 2013, the waning crescent moon should not intrude too greatly on the Eta Aquarid shower. The most meteors will probably rain down on May 5, in the dark hours before dawn. But the broad peak to this shower means that some meteors may fly in the dark hour before dawn for a few days before and after the predicted optimal date.
Thanks for the link, Mike. I'm happy to answer any questions on capturing meteors.
I don't cover settings for meteors in my document, so a quick rundown here. Remember, a meteor is a fast-moving point of light as far as the camera is concerned -- a typical meteor streak will not last longer than a couple of seconds at most. (If it lasts a lot longer, find somewhere to duck and cover!)
Therefore, we need to capture as much of that light as possible. The key elements are generally as follows:
1. The widest-angle lens you have. This isn't a strict requirement, but makes things a lot easier -- the more sky you capture in your shot, the more chance you have of a meteor being in that section of sky. Remember that while these meteors will appear to radiate from a certain point (in this case, the constellation Aquarius, hence the name), they will still appear over a very wide area of the sky -- so the chances of one passing through the area a telephoto lens can see is very slim.
2. A very wide aperture. We want to capture as much light as possible in the brief time the meteor is visibly streaking, so we need to let that light into the camera. Set the camera to the widest aperture (smallest f-number), which will typically be somewhere between f/2.8 and f/4.0, depending on your lens.
3. A high ISO. Even the brightest meteor streaks are fairly dim as far as the camera is concerned, so, along with the wide aperture, we need to use a very high ISO. The bare minimum to use should be around ISO 800, and if your camera has good high-ISO performance (not too much noise), you should consider trying shots at between ISO 1600 and 3200 as well.
The shutter speed actually makes very little difference to capturing the actual meteor -- consider a meteor a bit like a lightning strike. Whether you use a 3 second exposure or a 30 second exposure, as long as the shutter is open when the meteor streaks, you'll capture it with the same brightness. Your shutter speed will therefore determine the brightness of the stationary, or relatively-stationary, parts of your image -- any landscape in the shot, and to a degree how bright the stars are. If you are in an area with high light pollution, you will want to use a relatively short shutter speed, otherwise you will find the sky appears grey or even white, masking out any streaks you might capture. In low-light areas you can use shutter speeds of 30 seconds or even longer (at which point you will be capturing star trails, so you may also want to read the document of mine that Mike linked to).
Above all, experiment -- especially with shutter speed and ISO. Take a variety of shots ranging from 5 seconds to 30 seconds or higher, and at a range of high ISO values (800 and above), especially if this is your first time and you are unsure what your camera can and can't do. And remember that meteor streaks are unpredictable -- the more you have your shutter open, the more likely you are to capture one, so rather than take a shot every five minutes and feel depressed because you didn't capture anything, aim to fill up that memory card by taking shots as much as possible, pausing only to try out different settings. 99% of your photos will have no streaks in them, but this is digital -- you can delete them when you get back to the PC!
Here's an example shot I took with my old camera of the Perseid meteor shower last year:
In this case, I used a 60 second exposure at f/4.0 and ISO 3200. Remember, the long exposure doesn't alter the brightness of the streak, but does alter the brightness of the landscape and the stars and Milky Way. This was very much pushing the limits of my old camera -- the lens I used only opened up as far as f/4.0 and the camera was struggling at ISO 3200, but it's still a pretty respectable shot, and taken with a DSLR released in 2008.
@abirkill thanks for all the info ~ one day I hope to have a nice night sky shot to show back :-) ~ I remember this shot when it was posted ~ blew me away then and still now
@cameronknowlton I disabled long exposure noise reduction in camera because I didn't want the downtime of having to wait for the dark frame to be taken after every shot. Usually I leave it enabled, but for meteors it halves the chance of you catching one.
For shots that looked promising I therefore replicated the camera settings with the lens cap on at home and did a manual dark frame -- not ideal because the temperature and other environmental factors will have altered, but good enough.
I then loaded both RAW files (the shot and the dark frame) into Adobe Camera Raw and applied the same adjustments to each photo -- this included using Adobe's luminance and chroma noise reduction to get the random noise as much under control as possible. Both shots were then opened in Photoshop as layers and the dark frame was subtracted from the primary shot (I think using the blending mode described here, although it was a while ago).
That removed most of the hot pixels and the slight sensor bias the 50D showed. The other problem was significant banding from the 50D sensor which noise reduction couldn't handle (it was too coarse to be detected as noise). I managed to control this sufficiently by a combination of saturation and curves adjustment layers to control the 'red' colour that was most prevalent in the banding, desaturating it and adjusting the brightness to match the sky. The result still wouldn't stand being printed at any significant size, but that was the best I could get out of the camera.
Once I'd captured this meteor, I was pretty sure it was the best I was going to get (it was the brightest I'd seen in about 3 hours and fortunately was entirely in-frame), so I left the camera in the same location and did a longer, lower-ISO exposure for the ground, which was then relatively easy to blend into the other shot -- by doing this I try and maximise the quality of the bits of the photo that aren't moving (or at least, don't appear to be!)
Fortunately the 5D3 is a lot more forgiving with high-ISO noise, and you can often get away without needing a dark frame even at very high ISO settings provided the shutter speed is under a minute or so. It also has very little banding and the noise it does have is very controllable in Adobe Camera Raw, although it does have the Canon trademark 'purple shadows' issue if you try and push things too far.
@mikegifford wow, I love this. It was cloudy and foggy the whole weekend! I'm disappointed I didn't get to see any of it. Glad you did and this star trails shot is terrific! Thanks again for the heads up!
@mikegifford lovely shot ~ love it! ~ unfortunately I didn't get to try ~ I had a christening to photograph this weekend [my first] and prep , the day etc have worn me out too much to stay awake til dark LOL
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I saw a link on Earthsky FB page earlier but hadn't yet looked so thank you for the reminder
I don't cover settings for meteors in my document, so a quick rundown here. Remember, a meteor is a fast-moving point of light as far as the camera is concerned -- a typical meteor streak will not last longer than a couple of seconds at most. (If it lasts a lot longer, find somewhere to duck and cover!)
Therefore, we need to capture as much of that light as possible. The key elements are generally as follows:
1. The widest-angle lens you have. This isn't a strict requirement, but makes things a lot easier -- the more sky you capture in your shot, the more chance you have of a meteor being in that section of sky. Remember that while these meteors will appear to radiate from a certain point (in this case, the constellation Aquarius, hence the name), they will still appear over a very wide area of the sky -- so the chances of one passing through the area a telephoto lens can see is very slim.
2. A very wide aperture. We want to capture as much light as possible in the brief time the meteor is visibly streaking, so we need to let that light into the camera. Set the camera to the widest aperture (smallest f-number), which will typically be somewhere between f/2.8 and f/4.0, depending on your lens.
3. A high ISO. Even the brightest meteor streaks are fairly dim as far as the camera is concerned, so, along with the wide aperture, we need to use a very high ISO. The bare minimum to use should be around ISO 800, and if your camera has good high-ISO performance (not too much noise), you should consider trying shots at between ISO 1600 and 3200 as well.
The shutter speed actually makes very little difference to capturing the actual meteor -- consider a meteor a bit like a lightning strike. Whether you use a 3 second exposure or a 30 second exposure, as long as the shutter is open when the meteor streaks, you'll capture it with the same brightness. Your shutter speed will therefore determine the brightness of the stationary, or relatively-stationary, parts of your image -- any landscape in the shot, and to a degree how bright the stars are. If you are in an area with high light pollution, you will want to use a relatively short shutter speed, otherwise you will find the sky appears grey or even white, masking out any streaks you might capture. In low-light areas you can use shutter speeds of 30 seconds or even longer (at which point you will be capturing star trails, so you may also want to read the document of mine that Mike linked to).
Above all, experiment -- especially with shutter speed and ISO. Take a variety of shots ranging from 5 seconds to 30 seconds or higher, and at a range of high ISO values (800 and above), especially if this is your first time and you are unsure what your camera can and can't do. And remember that meteor streaks are unpredictable -- the more you have your shutter open, the more likely you are to capture one, so rather than take a shot every five minutes and feel depressed because you didn't capture anything, aim to fill up that memory card by taking shots as much as possible, pausing only to try out different settings. 99% of your photos will have no streaks in them, but this is digital -- you can delete them when you get back to the PC!
Here's an example shot I took with my old camera of the Perseid meteor shower last year:
In this case, I used a 60 second exposure at f/4.0 and ISO 3200. Remember, the long exposure doesn't alter the brightness of the streak, but does alter the brightness of the landscape and the stars and Milky Way. This was very much pushing the limits of my old camera -- the lens I used only opened up as far as f/4.0 and the camera was struggling at ISO 3200, but it's still a pretty respectable shot, and taken with a DSLR released in 2008.
For shots that looked promising I therefore replicated the camera settings with the lens cap on at home and did a manual dark frame -- not ideal because the temperature and other environmental factors will have altered, but good enough.
I then loaded both RAW files (the shot and the dark frame) into Adobe Camera Raw and applied the same adjustments to each photo -- this included using Adobe's luminance and chroma noise reduction to get the random noise as much under control as possible. Both shots were then opened in Photoshop as layers and the dark frame was subtracted from the primary shot (I think using the blending mode described here, although it was a while ago).
That removed most of the hot pixels and the slight sensor bias the 50D showed. The other problem was significant banding from the 50D sensor which noise reduction couldn't handle (it was too coarse to be detected as noise). I managed to control this sufficiently by a combination of saturation and curves adjustment layers to control the 'red' colour that was most prevalent in the banding, desaturating it and adjusting the brightness to match the sky. The result still wouldn't stand being printed at any significant size, but that was the best I could get out of the camera.
Once I'd captured this meteor, I was pretty sure it was the best I was going to get (it was the brightest I'd seen in about 3 hours and fortunately was entirely in-frame), so I left the camera in the same location and did a longer, lower-ISO exposure for the ground, which was then relatively easy to blend into the other shot -- by doing this I try and maximise the quality of the bits of the photo that aren't moving (or at least, don't appear to be!)
Fortunately the 5D3 is a lot more forgiving with high-ISO noise, and you can often get away without needing a dark frame even at very high ISO settings provided the shutter speed is under a minute or so. It also has very little banding and the noise it does have is very controllable in Adobe Camera Raw, although it does have the Canon trademark 'purple shadows' issue if you try and push things too far.
Latest of EarthSky - points you to the radiant point. http://earthsky.org/?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=20a0610620-EarthSky_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-20a0610620-393664281
Not the best for trails, but I did see a few meteors. Anyone have better luck?