The Perseids

The Perseid meteor swarm reached its annual maximum at around 14:00 yesterday afternoon (local time) on the 12th August. That meant that for the past couple of nights (and hopefully tonight) the chances of seeing a meteor streak across the sky have been substantially increased.

So far, I’ve had a couple of attempts at observing. I was out at 04:00 on the 12th (I couldn’t sleep), and I did see many meteors. However, I was singularly unsuccessful at capturing any of them with my camera.

Last night, I tried again at about 00:30 for an hour or so. It seemed to me that the rate of meteors had fallen away considerably from the night before, but I did manage to capture one with my camera. It’s not a very good photo, but it does show Ursa Major (the Plough) over the house, with a Perseid streaking in from the right of the frame.