This Perseid meteor streaks through the summer Milky Way August 13, 2010, at 2:17:12 CDT. Near the bottom of the image, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) glows, and below and to the left of center you can see the tiny image of the Double Cluster in Perseus (NGC 869 and NGC 884). Darren Trizzino photo
Michael, we had a fantastic trip to Fort Davis, Texas, to see the Perseid meteor shower. My wife, Julia, and I traveled there with her sister’s family from Austin.
We arrived at our viewing location August 11 around 11:30 p.m. and left around 3:30 a.m. Among the four of us, we tried to count as many meteors as we could. We logged 213.
At least 26 of the meteors were not Perseids. I could have sworn some of these sporadics were originating from a common location. We also observed the following evening but were not keeping tally. Overall, the evening of the maximum [August 12] was fairly lackluster. The meteors were neither particularly bright — nor were their trails particularly long.
I’ve included the better of two meteor photos from the first night. The second night [August 13], although we counted far fewer meteors, we saw more with much longer trails and, on average, the meteors were brighter. I caught four more meteors on the second evening with the camera. I took all of the photos through my Canon 5D Mark II DSLR, a wide-angle/zoom lens set to 24mm and f/2.8, ISO3200, and 15-second exposures.
Thanks, Darren, for a great report!