August 12th, 2020, 04:20 a.m. local time
Meteors! They are today’s topic. I got up very early this morning and saw six of them, likely from the Perseid Meteor Shower. Although the sky was clear, that pesky Moon was still shining bright at 4am, even in its Waning Crescent phase. Fortunately, my large tree to the East blocked its direct light.
Aside from visual observation, I also set up my iPhone on a tripod and ran the NightCap app in Meteor Mode. It continually took several-second exposure images indefinitely. I let it run from for about 40 minutes, until around 5am when the sky started to visibly lighten.
The image above was the most spectacular, captured very early in the session. The other images mostly caught “space junk,” i.e. random satellites. I didn’t see this specific meteor as, early on, I was more busy watching my phone and remote-control watch to ensure everything was in working order.
Where in the sky was this image taken? Unless you’re familiar with the constellations, it will be hard to guess. I had the phone on tripod pointed almost straight up. Interestingly, I noticed while viewing this image in a dark room, you can see a dark aura emanating from the center top; that is the sky’s Zenith, and you can get a sense for how bad my light pollution is even around 4am.
Thanks to Roger Powell’s recent post on identifying photographic objects, I discovered nova.astrometry.net, which can identify the place in the sky your image was taken. It’s very neat. I uploaded my meteor image and it identified the constellations captured. I will call this the meteor of Pegasus-Equuleus of August the 12th, 2020:
