Perseids Over Upper Goliath

Today’s post highlights the reason behind my recent trip to Mount Evans, in the Colorado Rockies … to capture the annual Perseids meteor shower over the mountains. This trip was a mixed bag. I managed to capture a couple of meteors, but the weather was not conducive to capture the large number of meteors that typically are the Perseids. As it turned out, peak night was totally washed out by a heavy cloud cover and rain. On the night I made this post’s capture, the night before peak, I was able to shoot for only a couple of hours, and only during the early evening hours, before the Perseids really started raining down.

My objective was to capture the meteors by using a bristle-cone pine in the foreground. The location for this first night of shooting was Upper Goliath Wilderness Area, where bristle-cone pines are common. During this first night, I used an old bristle-cone pine stump, with it’s curly, gnarly branches as the foreground focal point. I light painted the bristle-cone pine, so it would be visible in the nighttime image. During my short evening of shooting, I only saw 3 meteors with my eyes … two very strong meteors and a single “weakling”. Here is the strong meteor I managed to capture:

Perseids meteor shower over Mount Evans

And if you look very closely, you can see a weak meteor in this image (located below the obvious meteor, towards the righthand side, and shooting down towards the bristle-cone pine stump)

With my very short access to the meteor shower, I did manage to get out early in the morning for some wonderful Mount Evans sunrises. I’ll share some of those in upcoming posts.

Photographic Equipment Used:

  • Canon 5D Mark 3 body
  • Rokinon 14mm lens, f/2.8
  • Bogen 3221 tripod, with ballhead
  • ISO 3200
  • Shutter 28 seconds
Posted in Astrophotography, Landscape Photography, Nature Photography, Travel Photography
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