Perseid Meteor and the Andromeda Galaxy

PHOTO

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The 2002 Persied meteor shower lived up to its fame with long bright meteor trails. Ever since my last time photographing it in 1997, I've been hoping to capture a bright meteor sweeping past M31, the Andromeda galaxy. The problem with photographing meteor showers is that you never know where a meteor is going to be to point the camera. So I just took photographs of different locations in the sky with different focal length lenses. I was more than pleased when I got my film back and saw this wonderful scene. The field visible in this image is 14-1/2 degrees wide by 9-2/3 degrees high. The extent of the galaxy is easier to see in the negative of this image. Put the mouse cursor over the image to see this.

I took this photograph with my Olympus OM-3 camera and Zuiko (Olympus) 135mm f/2.8 lens attached to my Losmandy G-11 equatorial mount in the desert northeast of Phoenix, Arizona on the morning of 13 August 2002. The exposure was 10 minutes at f/2.8 with Kodak Elite Chrome 400 35mm slide film push processed for ISO 800. I scanned the image with my Nikon Coolscan LS-2000 and used Adobe Photoshop for further processing. Photograph by Rick Scott


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Updated: 19 August 2002