Meteor Shower in Churu Desert of Rajasthan State in India

There was a time when I was crazy about the star trails and spent significant nights in Himalayas to shoot star-trails which have won various contests and then suddenly tendency to do Night photography rested on the back bench. But I had never attempted to click shooting stars. Probably because of the lazy for not doing the homework and avoiding the wait for right moments to capture. This time, by chance a shooting star got captured in my Travelling camera when we were in Churu.

If you haven't noticed the shooting star yet, please see the first photograph again :). It was a beautiful evening with lot of shooting stars around the desert. Meteoroid is  basically a small rocky or metallic body which travels through the space. Meteoroids are extremely smaller than asteroids. Size of a meteoroid ranges from small grains to 1 meter wide objects. 

These shooting stars look beautiful in the sky full of stars. This was a super meteoroid shower that night and everyone was really very excited about the same.

This event made me think about photography shooting stars and started studying more about it. This post is more about sharing some of the information we gathered about photographing shooting stars and soon will share some of the results we achieve through our experiments. 

The very first steps is to know the appropriate meteoroid shower. It's important to know appropriate dates and how moon is positioned. Sometimes people want to avoid moon in their frame, although I like to take that call on the basis of brightness of the moon, time and clarity at that particular time.

While planning the shoot, use your widest lens and aim at the radiant. You will need to use very high ISO (sometime like 1600 or 3200) and short exposure times, so that you don't capture star movement. Otheriwse it will start looking like a maller version of stra-trails and it will be difficult to capture the movement of shooting star. Something between 5 and 30 seconds. Another reason for avoiding long exposure is that it may wash the movement because of glowing sky. It's better if you have an intervalometer program to shoot continuously. If you don't have, I am sure you wont mind using your figures. 

Overall it sounds that photographing meteors during a meteor shower is not as difficult as you may think. But it will require some homework, some preparation, luck :) and appropriate camera gear.

To know about photographing Shooting stars, you can check - 

http://www.photographyblogger.net/how-to-photograph-a-meteor-shower/

http://www.ppmag.com/web-exclusives/2012/09/photographing-meteor-showers.html

http://www.slrlounge.com/how-to-photograph-a-meteor-shower-2013-perseid

http://www.steves-digicams.com/knowledge-center/how-tos/digital-photography-101-how-to-photograph-meteor-showers.html

http://www.kadamsphoto.com/nightphotography/photographing-meteor-showers/