Composite Image at the Peak of the 2026 Perseid Meteor Shower

In spite of intermittent cloud cover I was able to capture 24 colourful meteor steaks over 90 minutes starting at 2:40 am near the peak of the Perseid meteor shower on August 13. I sifted through about 400 images to find the 24 meteors, and used Photoshop to create a composite image of the individual streaks, polar aligned to a baseline image that shows Andromeda, the Pleiades and Cappella bordering the Milky Way, framed by trees in my back yard.

I calculated the Perseid meteor rate for the full sky under these conditions to be about 75/hour, which reflects the degraded visibility at my location.

Nikon D750, Sigma 14-24 mm lens at 14 mm.

Background is a stack of 20 x 13 s images, ISO 6400 f 2.8, created using Starry Landscape Stacker. Photoshop was used to polar align and overlay 24 meteor streaks captured using the same settings.