Astrophotography to me has always seemed like a mix between planning, technique – and sheer luck. I was photographing the Northern Lights a few days ago when I managed to capture another astrophotography phenomenon in the same frame: a Perseid meteor.
While photographing the Northern Lights requires ideal conditions and the lights are often short-lived, that’s not entirely true for the Perseids. The meteors still need clear skies and low light pollution, but they're hardly a one-night-only show. While the Perseid meteors peak August 12-13, the meteor shower stretches from July 17 through August 24, leaving plenty of room to re-plan if clouds get in the way.
I took this photo on August 2, a full ten days before the peak of the meteor shower would heighten my chances of catching one – or several – in the same frame.
The challenging part about photographing the Perseids is that if I wait until I see one streak across the sky, I’ve already missed my shot. Catching the meteors on camera typically involves a long exposure time and taking multiple shots.
But trying to get the Northern Lights and a meteor in the same shot proved even trickier. The Northern Lights were close to the horizon, not overhead. I still wanted the lights reflected off the lake to be in the shot, so the sky only takes up part of the frame.
I managed to catch a meteor on the upper edge of the frame by digging out the widest lens that I have in my bag: The Venus Optics Laowa 9mm f/2.8 Zero-D, which, on my Fujifilm X-T4, is a 13.5mm lens in full-frame equivalent.
The 9mm is a recent addition to my camera bag that I added to my wish list specifically for astrophotography. The lens is one of the most affordable lenses in my bag (excluding the PolarPro LightLeak and a vintage film lens I picked up at a garage sale).
One of the reasons that the 9mm sits more on the affordable side is that it’s a manual-focus-only lens. I usually prefer autofocus lenses, but autofocus doesn’t work on the stars (at least, not for most cameras), so I knew I wouldn’t miss it too much.
I didn’t manage to catch the Perseid meteors until after the Northern Lights seemed to slow down a bit from the pillars that I spotted just after sunset. But I was ecstatic to catch multiple night sky phenomena in one shot, without stacking multiple images together.
The Perseids peak August 12-13 and continue through August 24. Read more on how to plan and what camera settings to use in this guide on how to photograph the Perseids.
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