How to Photograph a Meteor Shower

Catching a bright meteor is a mix of planning and patience. Here's how to stack the odds in your favor.

Pick the shower and the night

The richest annual showers are the Perseids (mid-August), Geminids (mid-December) and Quadrantids (early January). The meteor shower calendar lists every major shower with its next peak date, rate and moon conditions, and each shower page shows the best time to watch from every state.

The moon matters as much as the shower. A bright moon near the peak can cut visible rates in half or more.

Where to point the camera

Meteors seem to come from the radiant, but they're longest and most photogenic 45–60° away from it. Point the camera at a dark part of the sky about that far from the radiant, at a moderate altitude, ideally with an interesting foreground.

Settings

Lens: your widest fast lens (14–24 mm, f/1.4–2.8) covers the most sky.
ISO: 1600–6400.
Shutter: 10–25 seconds — use the NPF rule if you want pin-point stars.
Drive: an intervalometer shooting continuously, with a 1-second gap or less.
RAW, manual focus on a bright star, long-exposure noise reduction off (it doubles the dead time).

The workflow

Set up before astronomical dusk; check composition with a test shot.
Start the intervalometer and let it run for hours.
Keep the lens dew-free with a heater band.
Swap batteries without moving the tripod.
Back home, review frames for streaks. Satellites and planes leave dotted or even lines; meteors brighten and fade and often show color.
Composite: align frames (the sky rotates), stack all meteors into one image over a single base frame.

Expectations

Published rates (ZHR) assume a perfect sky with the radiant overhead. Under real conditions you'll see far fewer — our state pages estimate the dark-sky rate from the radiant's altitude. A night of shooting might yield a handful of bright meteors, which is plenty for a striking composite.