The Moon set shortly before midnight on the night of August 12-13, and then I started taking wide-angle shots of Perseus and the surrounding sky. I took about 720 12-second exposures, and from them I was able to find 25 meteors. I cut and pasted the meteors from all the separate images into this sky background, trying to match the color and tone of the background as best I could.

Most of these meteors are Perseids, as can be seen because they seem to be coming from a region just to the left of the Perseus Double Cluster (to the lower left of center). A few of the meteors are sporadics, as they are heading in other directions. For example, the bright meteor just below the Andromeda Galaxy (to the lower right in this image) is a sporadic.

Of course, this image does not cover the entire sky, and while I was out watching, I saw many more meteors that appeared in other parts of the sky. This was the peak night for the Perseids for 2024, and it was a good show.

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Image details:  Mosaic based on 12-second exposures at ISO 3200, taken with a Canon T6i camera and a 16 mm lens at f/3.4.

August 12-13, 2024