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The Persied meteor shower can be counted on every year to bring joy to those who venture out to dark skies to watch. In this photograph, a large and bright meteor seems to to be coming from the Andromeda galaxy, known as M31 to astronomers. Another short and dim meteor can be seen near the left center of the image. The shower radiant, the point in the sky that the meteors seem to radiate from, can be found by tracing back to the left and downward from these meteors.
I took this photograph with my Olympus OM-3 camera and Zuiko (Olympus) 21mm f/2 lens mounted a very simple home made equatorial mount in the desert east of Phoenix, Arizona on 12 August 1997. The exposure was eight minutes at f/2.8 and the film was Fuji P1600 35mm slide film. I scanned the image with a Nikon Coolscan LS-2000 and used Adobe Photoshop for further processing.
Updated: 22 February 2002