Perseids Meteor Shower at Pinnacles National Park

The Milky Way and Perseids Meteor Shower at Pinnacles National Park

I have long been fascinated by the idea of capturing photos of the night sky but have never really had a good opportunity to plan a trip to be in a dark sky location. To capture a milky way photo, you not only have to be at a location without much light pollution but also without too much moon light. This is important as you do not want the stars to be masked by the brighter moon. As I was planning for a trip to take photos of the milky way last summer, I learned that the peak of the Perseids Meteor Shower fell on a weekend night with a new moon, and the moon would set a little over an hour after sunset. From all the news I heard, this was said to be the best meteor shower show of the year due to the excellent visibility and the high Zenithal hourly rate, so I knew it would be a good opportunity to photograph the milky way and the meteor shower along with putting my new wide angle lens to the test.

My parents hiking through a boulder covered cave at Pinnacles National Park

After much planning and research, we decided to take a family trip to Pinnacles National Park. After driving down there in the morning, we spent the early afternoon hiking around the beautiful sheer-walled canyons, among the distinct rock spires, and through the boulder covered caves. Between hikes, we spent some time to sit down in the shade and have a little picnic. Hiking through the caves and resting in the shade was nice because it was shaded from the 90 something degree heat. Before sunset, we went on one last hike for the day to find a location where I could setup my camera for the stars. As the sun and moon set, blue hour turned to night, and the stars came out. There was not a single cloud in the sky to obscure our view. I have never seen so many stars so clearly in my life before, and it is crazy to think that there are so many stars out there. In addition to seeing all those stars, it was quite an experience to see and hear the meteors whistling through the night sky.

PhotoPills night augmented reality display (haha oops, ignore the calibration warning)

As for my photo, I first used the PhotoPills application on my phone to determine the location of the milky way. By using the augmented reality feature, I was able to compose my photo before the sun set. After I setup my camera on my tripod, I started taking photos before it got dark so that I could capture the details of the foreground. I did this so that I could blend a photo with an evenly lit foreground and a photo of the milky way in the background together in post-processing.

Sony Alpha a7 II + 16-35mm GM f/2.8 on a Manfrotto head and tripod

For my camera settings for the sky, I had it at f/2.8 at 16mm on my new, fancy Sony GM lens I bought a few weeks before this trip. I had my shutter speed at 15 seconds to capture as much light while still minimizing star trails. And lastly, I had my ISO at 3200. For the foreground during blue hour, I had those same settings except for the shutter speed at 30 seconds and whatever ISO correctly exposed the image. Then, I setup my camera with an intervalometer to take photos continually to maximize my chance of catching a meteor flying through my frame.

For post-processing, I edited the raw photos in Lightroom Classic. Then, I did all the blending, stacking, contrast adjustments, and other fine adjustments in Photoshop. For the foreground, I stacked 2 images for noise reduction and 3 images that I manually aligned for the sky for noise reduction as well. One of the problems which I had with creating this final photo was blending the blue hour shot with the milky way frame. This is normally a pretty straightforward process of masking in Photoshop, but in the middle of the night, I changed my framing of my shot by panning my camera to the left so that the milky way core would be in the center of the frame. Because of this, I had to warp and distort the original blue hour foreground shot to fit the same perspective of my final framing of the milky way. In addition, I took a 4+ minute exposure under only star light to try make up for the lost foreground detail on the left side of the frame.

Despite all the trials I went through, I am pretty happy with the final photo (at the top of this article) that I came away with. My final photo captures Mars to the left, the milky way in the center, and a Perseids Meteor on the right – all above the hilly, rocky landscape of Pinnacles National Park. Although I wished I could have stayed longer into the night so that I could capture more meteors and not need to change my framing, my parents and I had to go to work the next morning. I hope you enjoyed this story, and maybe you are inspired to go do some stargazing too! If you are thinking of taking photos of a meteor shower, I found this guide made by PhotoPills pretty helpful.