Some tips for photographing the Perseids.

The Perseid meteor shower is seen every year in August. At its peak, about 40 to 80 shooting stars per hour can be seen during the darkest part of the night. You need some luck to be able to capture things properly, but luckily there are also a number of things that you can influence yourself.

Before you read through the tips, please realize that you always need a bit of luck because you never know WHERE they will appear and whether they have enough light intensity to be observed. It always remains a challenge because the flashes of light are also very short!

Find a dark place.

Unfortunately, unlike Africa, this is a difficult task in the Netherlands. You can see the influence of street lamps, highways, greenhouses or cities almost everywhere in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the Netherlands is often filled with light pollution.
Fortunately there are isolated places find where you have less trouble. The Veluwe, Friesland and Wadden Islands are good places to get involved in star photography.

Set your white balance a bit cooler

Particularly in areas where light pollution is still very present, you will see that your images with an auto white balance setting are on the warm side. By setting your white balance towards 4000 Kelvin you get a more natural image. If you shoot in RAW, you can make adjustments afterwards, but because of the accuracy, I personally prefer to set it myself in the camera.

Turn off your noise cancelling

If your noise reduction is on, your camera will apply a so-called “dark frame” subtraction when using slow shutter speeds. A second photo is taken for this, which was the same length as your actual photo. So for 30 seconds of exposure, there is an additional 30 seconds of waiting time. On balance, you halve the time, which you can use yourself to increase your chances of photographing shooting stars.

Manual, Bulb, Burst Shooting and Cable Release

If everything is set up correctly and your composition and focus point are correct, you don't really have to do much yourself. So you can set your camera to manual, use your camera's internal series of shots (or cable release) and enjoy the night.
I myself use the Bulb setting because it can be set for me up to 30 minutes, where my manual setting can only expose for a maximum of 30 seconds.
Because I use the astrotracer function of my Pentax K-1, I can photograph the stars sharply for up to 3 minutes. (More on that another time)

Wide angle with large aperture

To maximize the chance of shooting stars, you want to have as much of the sky in your viewfinder as possible. So take your wide-angle lens with you! A 12 to 15mm lens on full-frame is ideal, but beautiful images can also be made with a 24mm lens. You also want to get as much light as possible on your sensor and an aperture of f2.8 or smaller is already very good. Smaller is also possible, but then you will have to work with somewhat higher ISO values.

Set your ISO high.

You need a high iso to properly capture the short flash of the meteor or shooting star. ISO 1600 is minimal, but you'd rather sit around ISO 3200 or even 6400. This will depend a bit on the quality of the sensor in your camera and your own tolerance for noise in images.

Shutter speed

I always take a series of test shots to determine the quality of the light. Start at 30 seconds and then see if you find the motion in the stars acceptable. This is the critical time when you start to see the rotation of the Earth reflected in the stars and you get dashes instead of dots.
If you also have the influence of the moon and/or ambient light, set the exposure a bit shorter. Once you are satisfied with your settings, you can start making a series and hope for a beautiful shooting star in your image