Aug 132010
Tried meteor photography last night with so-so results. Probably need a wider angle lens for this sort of thing.
Rather than pointing the camera at a dull part of the sky and hoping that a meteor would flash through, I pointed it at the Milky Way and hoped that a meteor would flash through. A few did.
I only caught part of this one with the 55mm lens, but it’s interesting since the trail is bright *green.* Boron contaminants, perhaps? Or something about the camera or sensor?
———-
Another partial trail, green-ish.
———————
Caught a whole one with the 18 mm lens.
————————
3 Responses to “Perseids”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I saw a bright green one once also. I was thinking copper.
But apparently, it can be due to a lot of differnt causes, including effects of oxygen, and without getting a spectrum of it it’s hard to track down what causes it:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100415-meteor-in-wisconsin-fireball-sky/
BTW, you want to see an interesting optical effect, photograph something in the near infrared with the camera. The CCD’s can see further into that region of the spectrum than the human eye, as I found out when my early generation camera showed the near invisible IR LED output from the transmitter for my wireless IR headphones as very bright on its back display screen.
Theoretically, you should be able to photograph objects that appear dark to the naked eye as glowing red due to their heat, unless they’ve done some fancy spectrum filtering on the CCDs in the intervening years.
There is some good information on the colors of meteors on the Leonid MAC page at (http://)leonid.arc.nasa.gov/meteor(.html)