Photographing the Geminid Meteor Shower with 5 cameras over 5 nights From La Palma.
Back in 2018 I visited La Palma to capture the Geminid meteor shower. Upon returning from the trip I handed in my letter of notice that I would be quitting my job as a mechanical design engineer. Not to say that it was a decision that came out of the blue, it had been on my mind for months and I had been saving enough money for a safety net but it was a decision that was being stalled by anxiety and fear. I wasn’t really making enough from my photography to survive, but what if I had the extra time to dedicate to it. Could I make it work?
Geminid Meteor Shower 2018. La Palma, Canary Islands.
Sony a7III + Sigma 50mm f/1.4 Art (f/2.0 | 419x10secs | ISO3200)
Lying under the stars on the rather uncomfortable volcanic rock, shivering away in the cold watching meteors streak across the sky was just the kind of experience I needed to finally say, “yup, this is exactly what I want to do with my life.” For all the difficulties and challenges faced in this genre of photography, it only makes the rewards that much sweeter.
Fast-forward 5 years and I receive a message from Jakob Sahner, a talented young astrophotographer from Germany, asking if I’d like to join him on a trip to La Palma for the Geminid meteor shower. His travel partner dropped out last minute and his trip was falling apart. How could I say no?
This year I had much more ambitious plans and a lot more camera gear than back in 2018. I desperately wanted to capture the meteor shower over multiple nights and create a 360 VR experience. I actually attempted to do so for the Perseids just months prior but anything that could have went wrong, went wrong. Don’t ask.
The Setup
So my plan was to capture all the meteors using two Sony a7 IV cameras (both astro modified, though that makes no difference for the job of capturing meteors) each with a TT Artisan 11mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. Sadly, this setup doesn’t cover the entire sky and so I used another camera, the Sony ZV-E1 with a wide-angle lens, to cover the blindspot between the fisheye lenses.
I used Anker batteries to power the cameras so that they could timelapse all night without the need for me to change the batteries. The cameras were mounted onto ballheads which were mounted onto Koolehaoda double arca-swiss clamps which were mounted onto a Sunwayfoto DPG-3016R arca-swiss nodal rail.
To keep the weight down I used a mini tripod from Benro, the TTOR03C. I knew I’d be leaving the cameras up on top of a peak, free from obstruction and out of the way for the night, so I didn’t need a tripod that was going to give me height to compose an image. This little tripod turned out to be way sturdier than I expected and handled the job effortlessly. In fact, one night I did use a larger tripod for this setup as I did need some height to peer over some bushes and it was the only night where I had wavy meteor streaks due to the wind induced tripod shake.
If I was to change anything about this setup it would be the ballheads. I’d swap them for two-way heads that allow you to see how many degrees you are panning and tilting. This would make setting up much quicker and more precise and enable me to minimise the blindspot with the perfect amount of overlap.
The Fourth and Fifth cameras
Whilst those three were timelapsing away capturing meteors I had a fourth camera to play with, an astro-modified Nikon Z6II. When I realised you could use a Megadap ETZ21 adapter to mount Sony lenses onto Nikon mirrorless cameras I couldn’t resist the urge to try a new brand camera body as I’ve been shooting exclusively with Sony for 6 or so years now. I have plenty to say about it, but I’ll save that for another blog and video.
I’d use this camera to capture the 360x180 degree panorama which would be the base image for all the meteors captured over the 5 nights running up to the peak. I tried a few different panoramas throughout the trip and ultimately settled on one with Gemini low in the sky above the telescopes of Roques de los Muchachos Observatory. I also captured other images unrelated to the meteor shower to keep myself entertained on the loooong, cold nights.
As for the fifth camera, that was my beloved full-spectrum modified Sony a7SIII which I use to film my vlogs. The plan was to capture as many meteors in real-time video as possible but I didn’t succeed as much as I would have liked. I’d planned to spend most of the night of the peak capturing video footage whilst I left my other cameras timelapsing but unfortunately half way through the night of the peak I fell sick. I started throwing up, I couldn’t concentrate and I ended up resting from about 2am to 6am, the best hours of the meteor shower!
Finding a Foreground
Stumbling around in the dark trying to find an interesting foreground for even the most basic of landscape astro photographs can be difficult enough. But when it comes to a 360 degree panorama, you’re looking for a location that is interesting in every direction. No easy feat.
In the nights running up to the peak we visited different locations each night and whenever I found a spot with potential I did a test panorama. Capturing a 360 degree panorama with a 24mm lens requires at least 28 images so for the test panoramas I just stuck to 20-second exposures. If I’d done 2-minute exposures it would take me at least an hour to capture just one panorama. I’d save that effort once I was settled on a location.
The other decision that needed to be made is what time I would capture the panorama. The reason this mattered so much is that it would dictate the position of Gemini and the meteor shower’s radiant point in the final image. La Palma is situated at 28.7°N and from here Gemini rises in the east, climbs high overhead and then sinks down into the west. It spends most of the night incredibly high in the sky, which would not be good for the final panorama as I wanted the radiant point to be visible in a basic projection of the panorama. So I needed Gemini to be low in the sky.
Capturing the sky when Gemini was rising didn’t make sense, as the meteors I would capture throughout the night would fall in a location of the sky that wasn’t visible in the base panorama. I needed to capture Gemini when it was low on the horizon in the west, so somewhere around 4:30 to 05:00am. This would add another complication on choosing a foreground; would the radiant point being in the west work well with my chosen foreground?
Enjoying the show
The path that runs across the volcanic caldera is pretty exposed and there’s very little in the way of comfortable, sheltered positions. I probably made things more difficult by wanting a foreground that was interesting in every direction as this encouraged a peak or a summit which had a view in every direction. We also planned to be out from 6pm in the evening until 6am in the morning, or however long we could last, every night.
Fortunately, the temperatures didn’t drop to freezing but the exposure you experience stationed on top of a tiny steep island in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean can grind you down and test your will. There’s barely a night without wind. And even if it’s not a strong wind, it cuts through you slowly, constantly and relentlessly.
I’d managed to squeeze a down sleeping bag into my luggage (the Mountain Equipment Helium 400) but didn’t have quite enough space for a camping mat. I could have brought an inflatable pad like the Thermarest NeoAir Xlite but the volcanic terrain of La Palma is probably not the best place to use something like that bareback.
But my prayers were answered when I entered the supermarket LIDL and a gleam of silver light shone right into my eyes. It was a reflective car windshield cover, the ones you use to stop the Sun from turning your car into an oven. It was made of thin foam, which improved the comfort of the rough, rocky terrain tenfold but what surprised me more was the way the reflective material very noticeably reflected my body heat back and provided an insulating barrier between me and the floor which was worth way more than the 5 euros I paid for it. Absolute bargain.
So when I wasn’t busy playing with one of my 5 cameras, I would tuck into my sleeping bag, lean against my camera bag, whip out a nice hot cup of tea from my Stanley thermos and nibble away on a Kit Kat whilst watching meteors streaking overhead. I was immediately transported back to 2018 and that feeling of euphoric bliss that convinced me to quit my job. It was so nice to lay under the stars and reflect on how the following 5 years had played out.
Processing the Data
Over the course of 5 nights I captured just over 12,000 images in my meteor timelapses. I had to sieve through each timelapse, image by image, hunting for meteors. Each time I found a meteor I would flag it in Lightroom and I would also add a colour label to denote how good of a meteor it was; red for small meteors, yellow for decent meteors and green for fireballs.
There is a piece of Windows software called Nebulb that promises to be able to pick out meteors in timelapse sequences but I’ve not tested it myself yet. If you have any experience with it I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
Anyway, after countless hours picking out all the meteors it was time to blend them onto my base panorama. But the way, the base panorama took me many hours over multiple days to edit in itself. Blending a tracked sky with a foreground is difficult enough with basic compositions, but when it comes to 360 degree images there’s a whole new level of complication.
All of the meteors I captured with the fisheye lenses I batch stitched into nearly-all-sky panorama images. This would make blending them onto the base panorama easier as the fisheye lenses have a lot of distortion which can curve the path of the meteor. So having them in an all-sky projection made it easier to line up the stars in the meteor image with the base panorama.
Then began the process of compositing the meteors one by one onto the base panorama. It’s quite a tedious task and one that really requires you to get into a flow state with no distractions. I left my phone outside of the office, turned do not disturb mode on, put on some noise cancelling headphones and opened up rain and thunder sounds on YouTube. White noise really helps me get into the zone. When I started to lack energy, I put on some soulful drum and bass on top of the rain sound to keep me ticking over.
If I was to redo the whole process, I think I would add the meteors after I had finished editing the base panorama. Adding them prior to the main edit caused all sorts of complications. Sometimes the edits I made would ruin the blend of the meteor onto the base panorama which would require a tonne of work to fix, and it also affected the brightness of the meteors more than I wanted. Either way, I’m more than happy with the final result.
I have this weird dream that one day when I’m old and grey lying on my death bed I’m going to put on some sort of VR headset and open up all these panoramas I captured over the years and be transported back to those moments. The bliss I felt in the challenging conditions, the things I had been lucky to feast my eyes on and if all the hours spent on these demanding images didn’t feel proportionately worth it now, they certainly will then.
Equirectangular projection of my final image. On the left Venus can be seen rising amongst some bright zodiacal light. The Carina nebula can also be seen just popping up over the horizon above the strong yellow light pollution.
Nikon Z6II-a + Sony 20mm f/1.8 G + iOptron Sky Guider Pro.
Panorama of 28 images: f/2.8 | 120 secs | ISO1600
Over 12,000 images captured between 3 cameras over 5 nights in order to capture meteors.
