The annual Perseid meteor shower occurs when debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle intercepts the Earth at a high velocity. The debris stream is somewhat diffuse, so we see activity for many days on either side of the peak. Predictions this year were for a relatively active shower, made more impressive by the absence of a Moon. However, most reports indicated that the shower was actually rather weak.

This is a composite image of 130 meteors collected over three evenings, August 10-12. Since the images were collected over about seven hours each night, the radiant of the shower is not in a fixed location. However, because most of the meteors occurred within a few hours of dawn, there is still an indication of a common radiant. I didn't analyze every meteor in this image; it is likely that five to ten of these meteors are sporadic events unrelated to the Perseid shower.

Long string-like images are stars captured as they traveled across the sky over many hours.

The weather was poor this year, with quite a bit of cloud cover every night. Last year I captured about this many meteors in a single night.