Because, why go in chronological order? More to the point however, the Eta Aquariids meteor shower is still going on for the next few days, we’re just not at peak. Not that I’m going to convince you to go out with this post, but we all know how good my luck with meteor showers is.
So I was out to do some time exposures in the quest for meteors last night, and the moon was a bit bright initially, but in this phase it was due to be setting as the shower was supposed to peak. I did a few frames before then, because.
That was in the opposite direction of the best sky view on Walkabout Estates, disappearing behind the roof, so I was fine with it, especially since the humidity wasn’t too high and thus the moon wasn’t lighting up the surrounding sky too much. This was also shortly after we were supposed to have some storms rolling through, which made no appearance whatsoever. Or so I thought, until I was out there firing off time exposures and realized how often the sky to the east was flashing, meaning there was an extremely active (though silent) thunderhead somewhere off in that direction.
One of the photographic things that I’ve had on my bucket list for a while is to capture some red sprites or blue jets, odd discharges that emanate from well above the tops of thunderheads and so visible only a significant distance from the storm, and these seemed to be the right conditions. So I loaded up the car and sought out a decent view out to the east. What I located was a boat launch a little way off of the river, up a tributary, but it provided a wider view than anywhere else I’d seen. Since the storm was quite distant (the lightning tracker app on my smutphone placed it as roughly 135 kilometers off!) I started with the long lens.
Far too distant to get anything but the barest vestige of the lightning bolts, though the glow and the Spanish moss on the tree gives the impression of a wildfire. However, this perspective won’t show sprites or jets, so I switched back to the wider lens and shot a lot of frames vertically at 18mm
The one thing I do know about sprites and jets is that they are dim and very transient, appearing for only a fraction of a second well above the standard electrical discharges, so I shot a lot of frames hoping to catch something, even when I wasn’t seeing any sign of such things myself. Alas, none of the long exposure frames at high ISO revealed anything either. You can see the same two trees from the previous image between the two glowing orange areas from the lightning, while the diffuse glow to the lower right is likely from a phosphate plant – there’s not much else in the direction.
By the way, the two stars in the lower center of the frame, directly above the righthand thunderhead and appearing almost oblong, are Prima Giedi and Algedi, forming the tip of the constellation Capricornus, most of which is below the horizon; just below and slightly right of those is a double star in the same constellation appearing as one, Dabih Major and Minor.
I also turned to the right, facing more south, because the sky was much more interesting there even though the storms were barely visible in that direction.
That’s a halfway-decent view of the center of the Milky Way, for a non-stacked, non-edited, in-camera frame. The bright stars at lower right form the tail of Scorpius, and the nice thick cluster of brighter clouds and darker dust lanes indicate that we’re looking towards the galactic center. No meteors, sprites, or jets in this frame though.
I also followed the Milky Way higher and across the sky more to frame something I’ve long been familiar with.
From being out walking at night while living in central New York, I rarely saw the brighter portion of the Milky Way like the previous frame, probably obscured by the nearby city lights most summer nights, but I always knew this section, riding high in the sky and (in this case) stretching from upper right to lower left. There’s a ‘gap’ visible in the dense band of stars, flanked by two brighter stars in the sky, slightly above dead center in this frame. These are what I always considered the ‘gateway’ stars holding that gap; Deneb and Sadr in the constellation Cygnus. Unfortunately my exposure here doesn’t quite carry the same impression, being a little too long and thus capturing a lot more of the dimmer stars within that gap (while not making Deneb and Sadr appear as bright as they are – they can only get so white in a photo.)
But wait! We have something at extreme lower left.
Seen here at full resolution, we have a faint streak that might, just might, be a meteor. Or a satellite, since I didn’t do a sequence of frames where I could examine this path for continuation. The teardrop shape to the stars comes mostly from their motion during the time exposure, but likely also from faint clouds or denser humidity affecting their apparent brightness during the exposure. But yeah – not a lot to show for 102 frames in pursuit of this very thing (maybe,) though I admit that I only chanced upon this one and other frames might reveal more of this kind of meteoric goodness if examined closely. The point is, I shouldn’t have to examine them closely – I want a big, bold, flaring or fragmenting streak across the sky. I mean, c’mon now.
Curiously, one of the thunderheads appeared to be growing, likely picking up warmer air off the water well out over the Atlantic now. But I clearly wasn’t having much luck and decided to wrap it up soon after this. These pics aren’t bad, just not what I was really after. And thus we continue my trend of not getting a damn thing worthwhile despite repeated attempts at these meteor showers, and no sign of red sprites or blue jets either, though I know those are much harder to witness. Still, not gonna happen without trying, right?