Perseids

Are we mad or what? That's what Jane and I said as we headed off to Dovers Hill near Winchcombe at 11pm last night in search of some dark skies.

We wanted to see and photograph some Meteors. We had tried on Sunday night but it was too cloudy and the light pollution from nearby Redditch really spoiled the effect.

As we rolled up in the car park at Dovers Hill we were surprised to see several other cars and immediately wondered if we had stumbled upon the sort of shenanigans that you hear goes on in these sort of places at night. I thought the occupants of the cars would be well impressed when they saw me take my camera out of the back of the car.

In fact, they were all there to look at the stars like us and there were several other photographers.

My intention was to take a lot of long exposure shots and combine them into star trails using StarTrax software. I had tried this on Sunday night but when I tried it with last nights images, the star trails, although spectacular, obscured any meteor tracks.

So this picture is a single shot. The object in the foreground is the beacon that was built for the millennium. You can also see the Milky Way quite clearly above the basket.

All this is good practice for when we go to Namibia in September where they apparently have some of the darkest skies in the world.

I previously blipped a meteor against the Aurora Borealis in January.

PS - I've just noticed a second much fainter trail in the Milky Way directly above the basket. I also think that the main trail is actually a plane track.