Prudent Pre-Perseids Peak Photo

Forecasts for the Cedar Rapids, Iowa area for the peak Perseids meteor shower the night/early morning of August 11/12 were not favorable--cloudiness and the potential for rain. For that reason the clear night/ early morning of the previous day afforded the best potential for viewing and photographing the spectacle. As it turned out this was exactly the case. This meteor streak occurred around 2:20 AM, Saturday, August 11, 2012, moving from left to right in the northeast sky as seen from over the back roof of our house on Brentwood Drive NE. The Perseids are an effect of tiny rocks and dust from the Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which the Earth moves through each year at this time. A crescent moon was just minutes away from peeking over the roof line, near the location of the Pleiades star cluster at center bottom. This image is a 20-second exposure at f/3.8, 500 ISO and 20mm focal length.