Yosemite Moonset & Meteor Shower (photo composite)

The peak of 2016 Perseid Meteor Shower in August from Yosemite National Park in California. The 70mm telephoto view shows the setting moonlight on iconic El Capitan and Half Dome, and Pleiades (the Seven Sisters) rising in the sky. In this photo composite, showing the shower activity during 20 minutes, meteors are caught on 12 various frames of a photo sequence and they are digitally added to a single 10-sec exposure shot of the sequence. From the photographer: “The shower reached the highest activity during these moments after midnight and that’s why so many meteors are captured in a small field of view of a telephoto lens and only during 20 minutes. As a personal preference I usually shoot single exposure images and rarely creates photo composites and look forward to an opportunity in future to capture such density of meteors in a single shot during the next “real” meteor storm, remembering the Leonids in 1998, 1999, and 2001 and all those unique single-exposure images.”

Click on the second photo for another meteor photo of the night, a fireball captured next to the Milky Way in a fisheye view. © Babak Tafreshi