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Eta Aquarid Meteor, Milky Way and Reflection

A few days ago I suggested that you could go out in the early morning hours, look east, and look for meteors from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower.  All week we've had storms here, so I wasn't able to look for it myself.  Yesterday morning, I finally had my chance.  I did capture many meteors, but mainly as the apparent source, or radiant point, of the meteor shower rose above the horizon starting around 2:40 am.  

Then reviewing my shots I saw this one earlier, around 12:23 am.  Was it an Eta Aquarid?  Meteors could come shooting up over the horizon a couple of hours before the radiant point in the constellation Aquarius rose, but I think that was going to occur more centered in this picture.  So the trail of an Eta Aquarid meteor should be pointing down and to the left, towards a point below the center, almost 90 degrees from this one's path.  So although this one appears to the observing camera to be roughly in the sky where many of the meteors did show up 2 to 3 hours later, it doesn't appear to be from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower.  Random meteors happen.

Well, Eta Aquarid meteor or not, this meteor's timing was great, streaking through the Milky Way while the lake was calm enough to provide an only slightly blurry reflection of it.  It's interesting to notice that the star reflections blur towards the camera as slight waves come towards shore in this long exposure, but the path of the meteor is more erratic because it doesn't stay still as waves make the reflecting surface also move.  Too often you'll see a photo with a perfect mirror reflection of the stars.  Can an entire lake be a perfectly flat mirror for the 30 seconds typically required to capture a star shot like this?  A small puddle perhaps, and a reflection in a lake looks mirror smooth for a short sunset exposure, but over the course of a long exposure, lake surfaces move.  I haven't seen a real lake provide a Photoshop-like mirror surface for a long dark sky exposure, but I hope I live long enough to see that night.

Here's a blog post I wrote a while back describing how to capture Milky Way images like this one:
Producing Milky Way Images
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2011/05/producing-milky-way-images.html

Join me June 29 for a Milky Way photography workshop in Bodie State Historic Park with fellow award-winning astrophotographer Steven Christenson: http://activesole.blogspot.com/p/bodie-night-photography-workshops-2013.html

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73 thoughts on “Eta Aquarid Meteor, Milky Way and Reflection”

  10. Leo Lee
    Reply

    When I was a kid, I grew up with this sky in the yard of my house. Guess what? Now, I cannot see those beautiful sky. What I see is few stars. Our next generations cannot see them with naked eyes any more. It is sad. Thank you for sharing it.

  20. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    The only type of Photoshop I have installed is the stripped-down Photoshop elements, and I only use it to save screen shots +Lens MB.  For minor adjustments I do use Adobe Lightroom.  Cameras do a poor job of measuring white balance in such little light, so you often end up with an unpleasant and unrealistic brown tint to night photos if you make no corrections.  So I did adjust the white balance slightly cooler to minimize the brown color caste caused by light pollution from incandescent lights in this Valley and from the town over the hills.  I also had to reduce noise, particularly in the reflection.  In this picture there was an airplane which left a red streak.    Since I don't use Photoshop, I had to remove it with about 10 dabs of the spot removal tool in Lightroom.  In case I might try to run a star recognition and tagging program on the photo, I tried to replace any stars affected by choosing similar ones nearby, so the only thing affected, changed or lost was the red trail of the airplane.  Due to the local light pollution from houses and Highway 395, the Milky Way wasn't showing up quite as well as it would normally.  I couldn't simply increase exposure or the noise would get worse, so I raised the brightness of the whites slightly, not to enhance anything beyond what we see locally, just to restore it to what we'd from a darker viewing position such as up Monitor Pass behind our house.  In other words, now in my fourth year of Milky Way photography and two years after I wrote that blog post I link to above, I do a lot less selective adjustment of images (to punch up the Milky Way for example.  It's partly an aesthetic choice, overly manipulated images can seem pretty cartoonish after a while, but it's also a practical one.  This image is one of 635 I processed to create a 22 second time-lapse video.  There's no way I could run an enhancement brush over the Milky Way, then move it often enough to track the Milky Way's movement, or subtle enough to have it not be dead obvious in the video.  

    So the answer is no to Photoshop, yes to minor adjustments and the deletion of an irrelevant airplane trail, no to whether I intended or consider the photo to be unreasonably enhanced.  (The airplanes remain in for the video.)

  24. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    Sometimes I do get lucky +Mayur surya, but  I'm now in my 5th year of chasing and recording meteor showers, and mostly my results come from planning very carefully:
    Upcoming Meteor Showers
    http://activesole.blogspot.com/2009/10/upcoming-meteor-showers-for-fall-2009.html 

    Here's an example of what that planning brings me:
    Perseid Meteor Shower 
    http://youtu.be/6YOxo7uI8ns
    (Best viewed after changing resolution to 720p HD, and displaying the video full screen.)

  38. Georgia Hughes
    Reply

    I'm in heaven dreaming that I was there but I'm at home bord and dreaming of that wornderful image there's loads of words to describe this pic like wonderful, amazing, buetiful, very nice, awsome, magnificent all sorts

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