How to photograph a meteor shower

Every year, Earth’s orbit carries it through the trail of dust a comet left behind on a past pass. Those grains hit the atmosphere at tens of kilometres a second and burn up as streaks of light — a meteor shower. Because the trail sits in a fixed part of Earth’s orbit, the shower peaks on close to the same calendar date every year: the Perseids in mid-August, the Geminids in mid-December, and a handful of smaller showers in between.

The radiant: where meteors come from, not where to point

Every shower has a radiant — the point in the sky the meteors appear to streak away from, named after the constellation it sits in (the Perseids radiate from Perseus, the Geminids from Gemini). It’s a perspective effect, the same reason motorway lane-markings seem to explode outward from a point ahead of you as you drive.

Meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, not just near the radiant — in fact the best shots often aren’t there at all. A meteor close to the radiant is foreshortened and looks short; the farther a meteor is from the radiant, the longer and more dramatic its streak. The practical takeaway: frame the radiant somewhere in your shot (so the shower reads as that shower), but off to one side, not dead centre — that gives the streaks room to run long across the rest of the frame.

When to shoot: peak night, dark hours, no moon

Three things have to line up:

• The peak night. Rates spike sharply around the shower’s peak and fall off within a day or two either side — check the date for this year’s pass, not last year’s.
• After midnight, usually. For most showers Earth’s night side is turning into the debris stream as the night goes on, so rates climb toward dawn. Plan for the pre-dawn hours, not just after sunset.
• A dark, moonless sky. A bright moon washes out all but the brightest meteors the same way it washes out the Milky Way — see finding dark skies. Check the moon phase and moonset time before committing to a night.

Shower strength is quoted as ZHR — zenithal hourly rate, the count a single observer would see under a perfectly dark sky with the radiant directly overhead. Real counts from a real horizon, with some light pollution and the radiant lower in the sky, run well below the quoted ZHR — don’t plan around the headline number.

Settings and technique

Shoot wide (14–24 mm) to cover as much sky as possible — you can’t predict exactly where the next meteor will streak, so a wide frame catches more of them. Use the widest aperture your lens has (f/1.4–f/2.8), and keep the shutter at the NPF-rule limit for your focal length so the background stars stay points, not trails, over the sequence.

Then just keep shooting: fire continuous NPF-length frames back-to-back with an intervalometer for the whole dark window, and sort the keepers afterward. A meteor shower isn’t a one-shot event — it’s a long exposure of attempts, and most of your frames will show nothing at all. That’s normal.

Gear

A sturdy tripod, a wide fast lens, and an intervalometer (or your camera’s built-in interval timer) to keep firing frames unattended through the cold hours. Bring a spare battery — hours of continuous shooting drains one fast in cold air.