spaceplasma:

Perseid meteor time-lapse

Time-lapse of a Perseid meteor over a period of 8,2 min shot close to Landshut, Germany. Every 12s a picture with 10s exposure time was taken. The animation consists of 42 frames. The first image is included twice to make the entrance more visible.

Credit: Thomas Bergwinkl

My wife dragged me out of the condo to look for Perseids last night, though in truth I didn’t require much dragging; 9,000 feet in the Eastern Sierra is a pretty sweet spot for meteors, even with the Austria Höf across the street with its ridiculous outdoor lighting.

Still: Several badass Perseids (with trails, like this one), naked-eye views of the Andomeda galaxy (most distant thing my unaided eyes are capable of seeing), and most of all that incredible view of the dark-sky Milky Way, straight up and over from Sagittarius, through Aquila, Cygnus, Cassiopeia, and down to Perseus, still mostly hidden by the horizon, because we’re old and boring and getting out of a warm bed after midnight just for an increase in the hourly meteor rate due to looking out our atmosphere’s front windshield rather than the back is a tough sell.

But we could see where Perseus was, because the trails of all the meteors pointed back to one point, the radiant, and I could mentally draw the lines, imagine their intersection, and know what it meant: That’s it. That’s the spot that marks comet Swift-Tuttle’s path, which our own unimaginably enormous yet unimaginably tiny ball of rock, with its razor-thin coating of water and soil and life and blessedly transparent air, is currently flying through.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/58155347152.