Perseids and a Suprise: 12 August 2024

The evening of 12 August 2024, was already special in that it is the second day of the Perseid meteor shower. Armed with this knowledge, I intended to visit a local field on foot with a camera to see what could be captured. On the same day, on my smart phone, the application called AuroraWatch UK was telling me that there was increased sunspot activity and that the likelihood of Aurora being seen in the UK peaked three times during the day. So, as the sky was looking promising, I set up both telescopes that I normally use in their usual place in the front garden. The first is a Seestar S50 which I pointed at a hydrogen nebula area in the constellation Cygnus located around a star called HIP984658A – I know, a very attractive name  The second telescope is a wide field refractor which is coupled to a new mono camera and its seven filter wheel assembly and this was set to capture hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur from the Elephant Trunk nebula IC1396. As this is a repeat of previous evenings, the set up was very quick. This allowed me to grab my short notice bag (rucksack with on old canon DSLR camera and tripod with charged batteries and a memory stick) and head out to the field. In that field, I set up the tripod and camera, and knowing that the Perseids originate from the constellation Perseus, which at that time was slightly east of North and low down in the sky, I lined up that area and used the widest lens I had t(a Samyang F2/16mm). Around 22:30. I noticed a slight red tinge to the sky when exposing 30 second images in manual mode on the camera. The colour was not visible to the naked eye. I continued to take 30 seconds images hoping to capture a Perseid meteor and it’s possible that some were captured and I still need to go through those images to see.