"When I consider your
heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars
which You have set in place, what is Man that You are
mindful of him?" -- Psalm 8:3,4
Leonids - 19.11.2002
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Leonids
19.1.2002 05:29:57 (04:29:57 UT)
Camera: Nikon Coolpix 995 on tripod
Objective: f=8.2mm, F=2.6
Exposure: 8s (ISO 400), incadescent white
balance, noise reduction on
Seeing: some clouds, near full Moon
Details of the whole frame was cropped to 640x480.
No processing was done.
It is nice to see changing colors on track of
meteor.
This photo is result of stacking 5 frames and
adding meteor to sky background.
It was easy, because I removed all noisy
background and bright fireball remained as
selection.
Now the photo is less noisy.
This is overall photo with full Leo constellation
visible. Click the image to see
large (1024x768) photo.
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pointer above the photo to see the labels
Leonids
19.1.2002 05:19:43 (04:19:43 UT)
Camera: SONY DCR-TRV240E Digital8 Camcorder on
tripod
Objective: f=2.4mm, F=1.6
Exposure: 2x 0.32s (If Lighter stack), auto white
balance, slow shutter (~3fps)
Seeing: some clouds, near full Moon
Details of the whole frame was cropped to 640x480.
Gamma 1.25 was applied.
Jupiter magnitude was -2.2. The flare of fireball
was much more brighter!
It was even much more brigther than Venus (-4.5mag).
Unfortunally the trajectory of fireball directed
towards us, so we saw only short apparent track.
Its pitty, that my Nikon camera was capturing
darkframe during that time :-(.
Videosequence of
above fireball in DivX 5.0.2 codec (the speed is
real):
Air shine after the fireball disappearance was
observable for more than 1 minute.
Processing details:
1, AVI file captured via FireWire from camera
2, Loaded into K3CCDTools
and every 8th frame was checked (because in Slow
Shutter mode the same frame (exposure ~1/3s) is
recorded to 8 frames)
3, Result frame was cropped to 375x240 size (in K3CCDTools)
4, Exported to AVI file (Export Frame collection...)
5, Resized to 400x240 (to maintain aspect ratio
of the picture*) and gamma 1.25
6, Compressed to DivX codec
* TV picture has aspect ratio 4:3, but it is
captured in resolution 720x576 (in ratio 4:3 it
should be 768x576). This is because pixel size in
DV resolution is not square.
Finally, here is a slow animation (~3 times
slower than real time) of fireball flare:
