by Gary Randall
This shot was made by
setting up my camera on a tripod and programming my cable release to
take 360 - 30 second exposures, which is 3 hours of time lapse. After
which I downloaded all of the photos and separated each shot that had a
meteor. I eliminated airplane trails and iridium flares. I then combined
them all into layers over another 30 second exposure of Mount Hood, the
lake and the sky that was taken that night. I then went about the painstaking task of masking out
each meteor so the background would show through the layer.
Once I have separated each meteor I
returned to the beginning and located the axis of rotation at the North
Star and then went about rotating each layer using a galaxy, Andromeda (?), as a
reference point of location to align their common point of origin without the affect of the rotation of the Earth.
After
I had each meteor coming from the proper point of origin I merged them
into one transparent layer and brightened them up and merged that layer
down onto the bottom layer.
And
this is the result. I've been working on this off and on for a week now
trying to get it right.
The photos were taken 8/13/10 between 12:30am - 3:30am.
Camera - Nikon D90
Exposure - 30
Aperture - f/2.8
Focal Length - 11 mm
ISO Speed - 1600