With the Binbrook observing site open for the past few nights — thanks to Councillor at Large Bernie Vanasse — various HAA members made an appearance to catch the Perseid Meteor Shower. Despite a mid-week peek making late nights difficult I grabbed my wife, essential gear,  the dog, and headed down to Binbrook to take in the show.

With only an hour to spend under the night skies I quickly setup my camera to record the action while we laid on camping air mattresses. Looking straight up, the skies were busy with celestial highlights. The main attraction did not disappoint with both faint and bright meteors streaking across the sky. The best left visible smoke trails, briefly illuminated by the glow of the meteoroid  itself. Satellites silently moved overhead in high numbers as well as an unexpected fly-over by the International Space Station (ISS).

The photo represents about an hours worth of exposure time taken with multiple 30 second exposures stacked on-top of each other. The circular lines showing star trails make the rotation of the Earth apparent. Lines perpendicular to the star trails are Perseid meteors and I count about 5 in this photo although some were missed by my camera. The bright broken line moving horizontally across the bottom of the photo is the ISS. The line is broken into 3 segments having been taken over 3 exposures with the time between exposures showing as blank spaces.

Unfortunately the meteors represented as streaks on the photo don’t do the real thing justice and faint detail such as smoke trails just don’t appear. While the peek has past there will be more meteors in the nights to come so get out and look up! If you would like to join other HAA members at Binbrook for club observing events then please consider becoming a member.