Joshua Tree National Park - perseid meteor shower 2016

So we ended up making the drive out Thursday night to @joshuatreenps to watch the meteor shower. I’ve never seen this place so crowded, it was like a zoo. Good thing we stuck to back roads so we were able to shoot in peace. However, this limited our comps and I ended up framing a solo tree against a pretty nice rock formation. I only had my 20mm on me so I chose to go vertical. I ended up pointing my camera a tad too far to the East as you can see the origin on the left side of the shot.  The Perseids have a distinct greenish color that changes so you can tell when you catch one in your frame. They usually have tapered ends and bright and dim sections. With the big ones it is obvious to tell, but some of the smaller ones can be confused with plane trails or satellites. I didn’t catch any massive ones in frame, but we saw quite a few as we sat out there which was very cool to see. This shot is made up of 3 snaps for the foreground right as the moon set using f/2.8, 30 sec, ISO-3200. They were then layered as a smart object using the mean stack mode to reduce noise. The sky consists of around 2.5 hours worth of meteors all shot at f/2.8, 15 sec, ISO-6400. One base layer was used and the meteors were layered in manually. Cool to catch Andromeda in the middle of the frame as well. All in all a fun night!

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