The August Shower

A photo composite of multiple exposures. The 2016 Perseid meteor shower in August captured from Uludag National Park in Turkey, as seen on Astronomy Picture of the Day. This photo composite shows the shower peak activity over the course of one hour. Meteors are caught on various frames of a photo sequence and superimposed to a single shot of the sequence to show the diversity and the actual place of the meteors that night compared to the background stars. From the photographer: “Apparently I set up my cameras on time for the first outburst of the shower, predicted for 2215 UT on 2016 August 11. The outburst was very eye catching, with the meteors arriving several per minute, and they were brighter than normal. I was not surprised to learn that ZHR surpassed 200. My setup consisting of a Canon EOS 6D and a 17mm f/2.8 fisheye lens seems to have caught 29 Perseids during the 1-hour interval between 0135 and 0235 local summer time (GMT+3) in 23 individual exposures.” Click the second photo for a single exposure shot that shows the brightest meteor (almost a fireball) of the sequence.