The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!!  This was unfortunately not the case for tonight, at least not for folks in Los Angeles.  With the yearly visit of the Leonid meteor shower, some years are better then others.  It depends on how much we brush through the tail of the comet Tempel-Tuttle.  The meteors appear to be coming from the constellation Leo, which is where they get their name.  In past years, this has been an amazing meteor shower.  With the most spectacular showers in 1866, 1899, and 1966 when thousands of meteors fell ever minute making the sky look like it truly was falling.  North America was expected to get 20-30 an hour, but I only saw 6 in 2 hours.  Asia was supposedly going to get 200-300 an hour.  Wonder if they did.

Tonight, or this morning really, Tom and I ventured out and away from the blazing lights of Los Angeles and headed North.  We got on the 405, then 5, then 14 and headed towards Palm Desert.  Knowing that looking East and North, would be our best bet.  62 miles away, we started taking backroads and finally ended up on a dirt road up near these hills.  The lights of the city were off in the distance but our eyes soon adjusted and we could see this would be a good spot.

Although capturing meteors may seem hard, it appeared more patience then anything.  I had my Canon timer remote and 2 cameras.  I setup one looking directly above with a fisheye, as to pretty much cover most of the sky.  I set it to go off for 30 seconds and then repeat.  I should have angled it a little more East, but this still seemed like the area I could get the most coverage.  I moved the other camera around, trying different angles, exposures, spots.  We even had some fun with multiple exposures and painting with light.  Not using too high of an ISO, as I wanted the shots to not have too much noise.  Trying not to shoot wide open, I ranged between F3-5.6.  I tried some at 2.8 as well, but never broke out the F1.2 as I didn't think it was worth it.  I should have tried some at F22, as the sparkle effect might have been cool.

Although I only captured a few shots with meteors, the night was fun.  It was nowhere as many meteors as we had hoped, but I guess seeing 6 and photographing a few was good enough.  We headed back to LA around 2:15AM.

Enjoy the photos and I hope to try this again someday, maybe when there are more meteors.

The photo above is NOT a Meteor, as the bright then dim portion signifys it was an airplane going by.  But still kind of cool.  :-)

A car came by when I was taking one of the photos, kind of turned out cool.