Quadrantids Meteor Shower

Here's a picture I took of the meteor shower last night.  Awesome.  The details. . .

I live too close to Memphis to do long exposures of the sky at night so I went down I-55 about 20 miles to Coldwater, MS.  I left home around 1:30 and got to the Coldwater exit around 2:00.  I don't think I've ever gotten off at that exit so I don't know anything about that area.  I took a left and tried to find a good empty spot away from houses and stuff.  A few turns off that road and I found a mostly empty field that only had one house in the distance.  It's 25 degrees.  I'm getting my tripod set up and trying to figure out the settings and stuff and through a little trial and error I determined that my exposure should be (at ISO 1000) 8 seconds at f/2.8.  That left the sky black but got enough information to capture stars that I myself couldn't see.


There was talk of the meteor shower peaking from 3:00-5:00 (60-100 meteors per hour--about one a minute) but I wasn't sure if that was Eastern time or what.  The moon was setting, so the sky was looking really good around 2:00.  At this point I'm assuming I'll be taking pictures for the next 2 hours and getting lots of "shooting stars".  By around 2:30 I'm getting frustrated.  It's worse than fishing.  I don't have a cable release so I'm standing behind my camera looking up at the sky hitting the shutter release every 8 seconds.  8 seconds, click.  8 seconds, click.  8 seconds, click.  For an hour.  Fun.  At one point one flashed right in front of me right in the middle of my 8-second exposure.  So I knew I got it.  I looked at the picture and the streak was so faint it literally made me laugh.  So by 3:00 I had one picture of a meteorite barely visible.  Barely.  


So I'm a little frustrated and wondering if I should go home.  They're obviously not coming one per minute.  In the hour between 2:00 & 3:00 I saw 5.  So, instead of one a minute, I saw one every 12 minutes.  No good.


At about 3:03 I remembered that I'm shooting with a D700.  A beast of a camera.  It has a intervalometer function built into the camera.  So, I set the camera up to take a picture, wait one second, take a picture, wait one second, take a picture, etc.  So this whole time I've been freezing my balls off I could've been sitting in the car watching my camera take pictures by itself.  Which is exactly what I did for the next 15 minutes.  At about 3:20 I decided to go home. The picture you see above is pretty much what I have 270 pictures of.  Fun, fun, fun.


Thanks!!