Perseids 2023 with a glimpse to the Milky way

            Remake of the original. This includes Milky way generated via stacking 10 sec exposures and blending that image to the quite bright background sky.

This year my plan was to image Perseids in three consecutive nights on both sides of the maximum, but my plans went out of the window due to clouds. But, as luck would have it, the night with the Perseids maximum was clear enough with only minor passing clouds and some sea fog. So, I packed my gear to my car around 19:00, wished my family a good night and drove about an hour from Espoo towards east to Emäsalo, Porvoo. There I used the same location as last year when I imaged the Perseids during a full Moon.

I walked a few hundred meters from the car, found a spot on the shore that was familiar to me (scouted the area with my son some time ago during daytime picnic) and set up my gear. I also took some background photos while waiting for the darkness to arrive. However, it should be noted that it really does not get dark here during the Perseids as the southern coast of Finland is quite high up north anyways. But I make do with what I have...   

I took the data between 23:25 Aug 12th and 02:59 Aug 13th Finnish time with Sony A7Riv, Samyang 12 mm fisheye + a heater strip and used iOptron SkyTracker Pro and camera's built-in intervalometer (settings: iso 1600, 10 sec exposures, f/2.8). Later I found out that the total amount of frames was 1168 and that meteors were found in about 28 frames. Lots of satellite trails and some sporadic satellites also. Some of these I cleaned away, some not. Then during the post processing I used Photoshop's quite nice AI denoise to clean the background image (I did not use denoising in any meteor trails, though). It's actually pretty amazing denoise as the background image with the sky is only a 10 sec exposure with lots of noise originally. Then I composited the meteor trails one by one on top of the background image and adjusted every single one of them to pop them out more but so that I kept the colors i.e. trying not to over expose the trails. This was done so that I could keep the trail colors which in my opinion looks interesting. No color boost or such were used for the trails, only exposure adjustment, so the colors are quite realistic, only more prominent than "out of the sensor". 

I also took myself from one of my background images and composited that in to the right side corner of the final image. I was there, it was a wonderful night and I wanted to make me also part of the image. Close to me you can see Jupiter low in the sky and its "Jupiter river" (compare to Moon river) on the Gulf of Finland. Left from Jupiter is Pleiades and on the far left side of the image one can see the Big dipper. 

Next time the plan is still to image more evenings as the nights are short here in Aug and in order to get more meteors using multiple night time hours seems to be the best approach. Oh, and f/4 with 20 sec or so, the coma is terrible with this lens wide open.  

So there it is. Colorful Perseids during the night of the maximum in the Southern Finnish coast in 2023.

Taken on: August 30, 2023

Tags:

WPD23Nature

sony a7riv

Sets appears in: • Meteors • Space

Groups appears in: • Astronomy • Amateur Astronomy more » • BBC Sky at Night and Stargazing Live • Universe Today • Backyard Astrophotography • samyang 8 mm 2.8 fisheye lens • Perseid Meteor Shower • Astrophotography - The Solar System and Beyond • Natural Night Landscapes (good quality only) • SonyAlphaLab - Share Your Sony Photos! • PhotographingSpace.com • Sony A7R I, II, III, IV, V - Best Pictures • World Photography Day Contest 2023 « less

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