2016 Perseids Meteor Shower

I did not have the opportunity to go to a dark site for the Perseids this year. However, I did setup a camera on a tracking mount and took pictures all night. I used the Canon 7D set at ISO-800 and a Canon 18-55mm lens set at 18mm, f/4.0. I took 60sec exposures every 65sec from late evening through dawn. The center of the frame was aligned with where I expected the radiant to be in the constellation of Perseus. I was surprised how few meteors I actually imaged ... only 11. Other AAS members who went to the dark site at Canyon of Eagles reported 50-100 per hour.

The image below is a composite of the eleven frames with meteors spanning from 12:30 to 4:30. In each frame, I flattened out and neutralized the skyglow gradient and lifted the black point to normalize the background level. I then chose a reference frame and merged in the meteor trails from the other frames. Finally, I reintroduced a slight color gradient. The image needs to be seen at full resolution to pick out any but the few brightest trails. See if you can find all eleven!