The Leonid meteor shower, 2009. Stitched two photos for a 15 minute exposure.

2 AM, Tuesday morning. I’m somewhere near Milton, where the roads cease to be roads, and are simply called “lines”. Seriously. Try telling a friend you live on 4^th line.

For that matter, try telling a friend that four teenagers, in a field at 2AM, are actually stargazing.

What we witnessed was the beginning of the Leonids Meteor shower. Says Wikipedia:

The Leonids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Leonids get their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo: the meteors appear to stream from that point in the sky. The 2009 display peaking on November 17 may produce more than 500 meteors an hour.

500 meteors an hour. On any given night, you’re lucky to see just one chunk of ice hurtling from the heavens, but a shower of this scale is simply immense. The hard part, we found, was driving far enough from the city to actually see anything, without actually driving very far at all.

We settled upon a small park way up Britania road, which was dark enough that we could actually see a good amount of stars – not cottage caliber, mind you, but more than was possible from our driveways.

We figured an alien abduction would occur at any moment.

Fears aside, I decided to take out the camera and try my hand at some long-exposure photography. Imagine you’ve been blindfolded, handed a cinderblock, and told to capture some stars. This is what long-exposure astral photography is like.

Capturing the stars is a dark art, and one I haven’t quite mastered just yet. It takes a tricky combination of ISO, aperture and shutter speed adjustments, with the slightest tweak to one dramatically affecting the other. And while we thought we escaped the city’s reach, light pollution was still a factor too.

Nevertheless, we still saw some meteors – at least six, I’d say. It was a far cry from the 500 or so predicted at peak times and places, but it was good enough.

Thanks to Alex, Steph and Danny for coming along – you made it quite the adventure. Here’s hoping for more of the same next year!

Last year, taken in Northern Ontario. 10 minute exposure at ISO 100. Note the milky way, and single meteor trail, bottom left.