Seven years of nights under the stars went into Meteor, a short 2014 time-lapse reel by Aspen, Colorado, photographer Thomas O’Brien. Streaks from the Perseid, Geminid and Leonid meteor showers flash across night skies above dark trees, compressed into a few minutes of film.
Thomas O’Brien’s Meteor time-lapse
O’Brien started experimenting with time-lapse in 2005. The reel came together almost by accident: “I never even looked at some of the images I shot, until this winter when I reorganized my entire library,” he told The Creators Project. He chose the big annual showers because they are “consistent and reliable”.
He mainly shoots raw sequences on a Canon 5D Mark III, with cameras and lights powered by Goal Zero equipment, and processes the footage with LRTimelapse and GBDeflicker, software that smooths exposure changes from frame to frame. The soundtrack is “Time Lapse of Clouds” by Buoy (Jonathan Gjertsen).
Watch in HD to see more of the fainter meteors. An extended edit is on YouTube, and the full footage is available in 4K.
Meteors, meteoroids and meteorites
NASA separates three terms that are often mixed up. A meteoroid is a piece of rock in space, from a dust grain to a small asteroid. When it hits the atmosphere at high speed and burns up, the streak of light is a meteor, the familiar “shooting star”. Any fragment that survives to reach the ground is a meteorite.
Meteor showers happen when Earth passes through the trail of dusty debris left by a comet or asteroid. All the meteors in a shower seem to come from one point in the sky, the radiant, and the shower is named after the constellation where that point lies.
The Perseids, Geminids and Leonids
- Perseids: peak around 12–13 August. Debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle; one of the most popular showers of the year.
- Leonids: peak around 16–17 November. Debris from Comet Tempel-Tuttle.
- Geminids: peak around 13–14 December, active from about 4 to 17 December. Unusually, the parent body is an asteroid, 3200 Phaethon. Under ideal skies the Geminids can produce about 120 meteors an hour at a medium speed of about 35 km/s.
How to watch and photograph a meteor shower
Get away from city lights, lie back and give your eyes time to adapt to the dark, avoiding phone screens. Look at a broad stretch of sky; meteors appear all over, not only near the radiant. On any clear night a few random meteors an hour are normal, while a strong shower brings many more.
For photographs, put a wide, fast lens on a sturdy tripod, set a high ISO and an exposure of 15–30 seconds, and let the camera shoot continuously for hours. Most frames will be empty; the occasional meteor is the reward. A time-lapse like O’Brien’s is built from thousands of such frames, gathered over many nights and many years. Dress for the mountains in winter: the Geminids peak on cold December nights.
For more skies in motion, see Vincent Brady’s Toroidal Sky: A Four-Camera Night-Sky Experiment, Iceland Aurora Films: Northern Lights from Sixty Locations and The Lyrid Meteor Shower: An April Event Beyond the 2014 Livestream.
Related reading
- The Mountain: Seven Days of Sky Photography at Teide
- Sun Halos over Finland: Understanding Pauli Hänninen’s Photographs
- Ten Northern-Lights Regions: Geography, Darkness and Realistic Expectations
- Ten Unusual Natural Phenomena: Storms, Ice, Light and Rock
- Mike Taylor’s Maine Aurora Photography and a Change of Direction
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