One Leonid

November 16, 2009
Tags: astronomy, Leonids, meteor shower

This evening I joined Moshe, Jeff, and Jennifer for a Leonid viewing north of Alpharetta. Visible in this photo's center, to the lower-left, is the brightest meteor we saw this evening. For scale, the Seven Sisters are located in the upper-right portion of the center. It's hard to capture the meteors on "film" since they're not much brighter than stars, and pass so quickly. It requires high sensitivity, which yields lots of sensor noise ... and in astronomy, it's hard to tell noise from actual stars.