Really Rocket Science

Pretty amazing indeed: capturing a Perseid meteor exploding. It’s legit, too. Via Universe Today…

Personally, I’ve never seen anything like this, and photographer and digital artist Michael K. Chung said he couldn’t believe what he saw when he was processing images he took for a timelapse of the Perseid meteor shower. It appears he captured a meteor explosion and the resulting expansion of a shock wave or debris ring.

“It was taken early in the morning on August 12, 2013 from my backyard in Victorville, CA,” Michael told Universe Today via email. “The fade to white is NOT an edit- it is overexposure due to the sun coming up. From what I can tell, the timelapse sequence of the explosion and expanding debris span an actual time of approximately 20 minutes.”

Michael said because he shoots at much higher resolution than 720p, he’s able to provide two different sequences in this video: one is with the full frame of each capture scaled/reduced and then cropped down to 1280×720, and the other is with the full frame kept at resolution with just the region around the explosion cropped to 1280×720. “I included each sequence twice – once at 24 frames per second and the other at around 12 fps.”

Not nearly as dramatic as a seemingly-exploding Large Megellanic Cloud Galaxy, but it’ll do.

Lots of fakes out on YouTube. The above video is for real, hopefully, and deserves a look.

And you can always trust our friends at NASA. Take, for example, today’s APOD…

Perseid Meteors and the Milky Way 
Image Credit & Copyright: Jens Hackmann

Explanation: Where will the next Perseid meteor appear? Sky enthusiasts who trekked outside for the Perseid meteor shower that peaked over the past few days typically had this question on their mind. Six meteors from this past weekend are visible in the above stacked image composite, including one bright fireball streaking along the band of the background Milky Way Galaxy. All Perseid meteors appear to come from the shower radiantin the constellation of Perseus. Early reports about this year’s Perseids indicate that as many as 100 meteors per hour were visible from some dark locations during the peak. The above digital mosaic was taken nearWeikersheim, Germany.

Growing Gallery: Perseid meteor shower image

Over 300 meteors captured in this one…