In recent days, there has been a lot of talk about August’s shooting star, the Perseid meteor shower. This year, we were able to observe the most famous meteor shower under perfect conditions. (Unless there’s a disco light nearby…)
Monica Landy-Gepnar, Band
This time I took pictures in Bánd, located in the Veszprém district, on the 12th and 13th of August, although it could have been better elsewhere … It was a village day, and there was a crazy discotheque who did the lasers in a very good way. The sky is until 1am… This also meant that the first half of the night we probably saw fewer meteors (I was with my husband as usual) than we could have, as everything was blinking colorfully and after a while we didn’t catch any flashes. We went out at sunset and I took pictures until 4:10 in the morning, the air was very humid and there was a strong green light in the atmosphere. For a short while there were a few veil clouds in the lower northern sky, but their presence was not disturbing, so the conditions were surprisingly good from a celestial point of view.
I shot with three cameras, two of them identical, old Nikon D5100s, with the same 10mm Sigma lens. I tried to use the same possible settings all the time. My goal was to be able to capture a large portion of the sky with a small overlap, and then put a lot of meteors supposedly on the panorama. In the end, there were 46 meteors on the final panorama, but the edges were so blank that I cut them off instead. However, the image is much larger than the base image would have been (it covered an area of sky seen from west to east, 260° to 95°), and most of the meteorites that fell in this area were also imaged. Unfortunately, a few nice brights slipped out of the photo when shooting in the stars, so about 15 of the shot was left. On the right edge of the image, Veszprém’s light pollution has already overlapped, unfortunately, so the crescent moon wasn’t very bright.
Basically, it was a weak max, in fact the problem was not so much quantity – although this was also a problem – but the lack of really bright fireballs PER, which were so beloved in the old days. Unfortunately, this has been showing a worsening trend for years, so one isn’t particularly surprised anymore, it’s not good to see this.
95% of the meteors seen were PER, and out of the rest some KCG and CAP stood out due to their slowness and relatively good brightness, and of course there were some spotty arrivals as well. There’s an amazing amount of satellites, compared to fireballs, they don’t go down at all, and a similar amount of planes, but summer weekends are especially bad because of the large number of vacationers. Fortunately, the PER maximum will drop on Monday and Tuesday next year, so you’ll probably be able to take pictures with minimal distractions, but until then, there will still be a non-moon GEM maximum in December!
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