Geminid Meteor Shower (2020) (Brent Newton)

Geminid Meteor Shower (2020)

Link: https://www.astronewton.com/astrophotography

This is a composite of several exposures on the Geminids taken throughout the night. Being close to winter, Fall River State Park is basically abandoned and I saw only one other vehicle in the campground. I parked near a boat ramp and, after taking some foreground images, targeted the rising eastern constellations to capture longer exposures of the background sky at f/5.6. At about 10pm I started taking shorter exposures at f/2.8 in order to capture transient events. Despite my preparations I can say this was not fun. I had several layers on to keep warm, but the steady breeze, freezing temperatures, and the lake effect meant I was left stuffing spare batteries into my gloves, sheltering in the car, and swapping camera batteries every 20-30 minutes since the cold conditions kept reducing their charge.

Calibration & Integration:

- Image Calibration using Bias, Flats, Darks

- Subframe Weighing for background images

- Registration for 90" background images and the 30" transient images (I probably should have searched them for meteors first, but found it easier to Blink them all after aligning them. Still, this took about 3 hours to register the highest total of about 700 images)

- Image Integration of the 90" background images

Background Processing:

- Crop

- DBE

- Deconvolution targeting stars

- Photometric CC

- Magenta Star Script (applied using star masking)

- Jon Rista method TGVD, MMT

- ASH + Masked Stretch

- ACDNR for final NR

- Curves, Saturation edits

- Exported as a TIFF to Photoshop

Meteor Processing:

- Image Container / Process Container to automate much of the following

- Image Calibration

- Crop to match 90" background

- DBE for each image

- Color Calibration

- TIFF Export

Photoshop Combination:

- Masked in each transient to the background image

- Levels, Saturation edits

Annotation image:

- Addition of constellation lines in Photoshop since Pix was unable to solve

- Blending in of Foreground images taken in dusk twilight + one single tracked image of the background for reference (moved slightly South/right but hey, its a comp)

Original
Final
B

B

Description: Artistic composite using Foreground + Annotation

Uploaded: ...

Central USA
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Bortle 2-3
Rokinon 14mm
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