Mostly Perseids
Image Credit &
Copyright:
Klaus Pillwatsch
In this predawn skyscape
recorded during the early morning hours of August 13, mostly Perseid meteors
are raining down on planet Earth.
You can easily
identify the Perseid meteor streaks.
They're the ones with trails that seem to converge on the
annual meteor shower's
radiant, a spot in the heroic constellation Perseus,
located off the top of the frame.
That's the direction in Earth's sky that looks along
the orbit of this meteor shower's parent, periodic
Comet Swift-Tuttle.
Of course the scene is a composite, a combination of about 500
digital exposures to capture meteors
registered with a single base frame exposure.
But all exposures were taken during a period of around 2.5 hours
from a wind farm near
Mönchhof, Burgenland, Austria.
Red lights on the individual wind turbine towers dot the foreground.
In their
spectacular close conjunction,
bright planets Jupiter and Venus are poised above the
eastern horizon.