Conditions: quite alot of passing clouds, only images without clouds were used
Setup: ST10XE camera, 50mm Nikkon objective; piggybacking on an 8" SCT which provided tracking
Quite alot of processing went into this one. There were passing clouds, satellites - even some branches from an overhead tree which I didn't want floating around.
Alot of short exposures were taken, those with clouds or a satellite were discarded. The images were the calibrated and aligned. Now, if the images are just combined using
a standard technique the rapidly moving Leonids will appear very weak relative to the fixed stars. Instead, I created two combined images: one using images that did NOT
contain a Leonid and another using images that did. The 'Leonid' combined image was created using MIRA's
'standard deviation' combination technique which brings out the meteor streaks well with respect the the stars, since where the meteor streak is the standard deviation will
be very large. However, the stars in this image do not look very natural and that's why I also created the non-Leonids image using a standard combination technique. In the final
step I loaded both images in Photoshop and replaced the un-natural looking stars in the standard deviation image with the good looking ones from the other image. After a bit of
curves and levels to bring out the Leonids even more I was done!
Here's my main page where you can see more of the pictures I have taken so far.
Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)