This post is dedicated to Jenny.  She watches after our daughter day in and day out and has very little free time for herself and after June goes off to bed she is too exhausted to really get out as much as she’d like to.  I’ve been there myself.  After a full day of trying to keep up with June all you really want to do is close your eyes and fall into bed.  So, I feel very lucky and appreciate the fact that she was cool with me spontaneously deciding to head up to the top of Mt. Baldy for the night to experience and photograph the Perseid Meteor shower.  I get to have all the fun.

I put the question out on my facebook of who might be out that night to see the meteor shower and my old High School friend Eddie replied with this location.  He goes annually to watch the stars here.  I am so glad I went.  It was nice to catch up with him.  My buddy Jeff, luckily, was also able to join me for this spontaneous excursion.  The view was amazing and the conditions were near perfect.  I got to witness some amazing meteors crossing the sky.  Unfortunately, I didn’t capture any of the real good ones with my camera.  I initially thought I hadn’t captured any meteors but once I got home and was able to sift through the shots I found that I actually did get a couple on film.  The three shots at the top are the three largest ones.  Beyond the meteors I did get to take some beautiful shots of the night sky.  I finally succeeded in getting that star-trail shot that I attempted and failed to get on Day 081.  Plus, the LA Basin below was quite a sight to see.

I experimented with various ISO’s and shutter lengths but eventually opted to set the camera to time lapse multiple 30 second exposures.  If I exposed the sky for any more than a minute the stationary stars would begin to trail and kind of ruin the shot.  Below you can watch the time lapses themselves.  They’re not very long so I have them running at half speed to give you more time to see everything.

I hope you enjoy!

 
PS: I also want to add a little apology for taking so long with the speaker Instructable. I have it mostly written. I need to organize my photos and double check the speakers to make sure I didn’t write something wrong in the description.