 I just got back from an excellent trip out to see family and I was lucky enough to have a clear sky for the peak of the Perseid meteor shower and was able to capture dozens of meteors on camera. So for this 5 minute Friday, I wanted to show you how to identify meteors because if you're new to capturing them, it's easy to mix them up with satellites or planes or other stuff up in the night sky. After we go identify the photos with meteors in them, I'll do a quick overview on how I make a stacked composite image with several meteors combined into one photo. My capture technique for the night was very simple. I just set up a DSLR and a fast 24mm lens, in this case the Rokinon, on a tripod. And then I just jammed, I set the camera to ISO 3200 8 second exposures and continuous shooting mode and then I just jammed this little release into the hold position so that it would keep taking photos one after the other. Because the trick with meteors is you don't want to miss any, so this is a good way to do it. If you have an intervalometer, just set it so that it's taking pictures continuously with as little gap as possible. I aimed the camera at the constellation Perseus, that's the constellation that the Perseid meteor shower is named after. So you can certainly review your photos right on the DSLR screen and I often do, but I find when I really want to find all the meteors that I've captured, it's easier to review the photos on the computer with a bigger screen. And there are many different applications for image review, there's Lightroom, there's Blink and Pixinsight, or even just the built-in Finder on Mac or File Explorer on Windows would work too. But I'm going to show you my preferred software for this task, which is Adobe Bridge, and this is an application designed solely for reviewing images and organizing them. So I have Adobe Bridge open here and I'm just going to use the right and left arrow keys to move through my pictures. And what I'm looking for are streaks of light, and I don't know if you can see this in the video, but I can already see some streaks of light going through the pictures here. But I already know that these streaks are satellites, let me show you how I know that. See how there's a streak there, and then if I jump to the very next frame, that streak continues along the same path. That means that that object was flying across the sky for more than eight seconds. So it's definitely a satellite, because a meteor just goes by like that, like it's a flash, like under a second, while a satellite moves a lot slower. So if you see the same object moving along a path in multiple frames, you know that it's not a meteor but a satellite or a plane. And here we have something more interesting. See how in the picture right before, nothing, then there's a streak right there going down, and then if I go to the next picture, it's gone. So it's only in one picture. So that's a good sign it might be a meteor. Let's now zoom in and look at it. And here's another good sign. It is brighter, and then it gets dimmer. So this isn't always true, but that's a good sign of a meteor, sometimes with, usually with satellites there, they're more consistently just aligned. And so I'm pretty sure that's a meteor. So what I'm going to do is just going to right click and choose five stars. And then I can come back once I've marked all the shots that I think have meteors and just limit this to just the shots I've identified with meteors in them. So let's keep going here. Okay, this looks like an interesting object. It looks nice and bright. It has some color to it. Maybe that's a meteor. Now if I zoom in, see how there are three distinct lines like that. It actually indicates that's a plane, because it's like the lights on the wings and then a headlight. So that's actually a plane going through my frame, and then I can confirm it should continue on and yes it does. Okay, so here's an interesting one. See that right there? Let's check it out. Okay, and the colors are a little bit wonky in these photos because I was using a modified camera, but this is another good way to tell if something is a meteor. If it has this sort of greenish cast to the whole thing or to part of it, they often sort of look like that, where they, especially in the tail of the meteor, you'll see a bit of green. Okay, I've now jumped ahead and I've gone through all the pictures that I took that night. How I can now limit it in Adobe Bridge to just the pictures that I've marked five stars, meaning with meteors. You go up here to filter items by rating and you just click show five stars and there we go. And so now I have all of the ones that I've marked as having potential meteors and I can review them. And also, like I said earlier, I can now make a composite image with multiple pictures. So let's open some of these up into Photoshop and I'll show you how I'm going to composite them together. So I took all of those pictures that we identified that had meteors in them and registered them all to one picture so that all the stars would all match up. So then I'm going to go here in Photoshop to file scripts, load files into stack. And I've already aligned them in Pixinsight so I'm not going to align them here. Okay, then they're all in here and I took the image that I registered all of the other images to and put it on the bottom and I'm going to use this as my base image because this is the one that I want to use the foreground. I like how the clouds look in the lake here. Then I'm going to take all of the images, all these layers above that image and click on the first one and then click on the last one to select them all and change all of their blending modes to lighten. Okay, and we get this sort of crazy look because we have all the foregrounds in here as well as all of the meteors as you can see up here. So what I'm going to do next is with these all still selected, I'm going to hit Command G or that would be Control G on Windows to group them so you can see they're now in a group. I'll just call this meteors and I'm going to add a layer mask to that group. You can see now we have the layer mask there. Okay, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go around on the image here and draw in black or paint in black rather with the brush tool over each meteor so that it disappears. And there is a method to this madness so just bear with me here while we do this. And a good way to do this is they're pretty straight, all these different meteors. So you can click and then shift click to draw right on the meteor. And you just want to get the meteor itself and nothing else. I'm going to click, shift click, hit that meteor, gone. Okay, so I've drawn in black on all of the meteors, you can see the layer mask looks like that now. And then I'm just going to invert this layer mask by pressing Command I on Mac or be Control I on Windows. And what we're left with is just the meteors because that's what's painted in white and everything else is black. So we've now added the meteors to this base layer. And that's it. The whole process for doing a meteor composite image. Now I probably need to delete this one too down here now that I'm looking at it because a meteor shouldn't be above the cloud layer like that. So I'll just go back into my layer mask here and paint that one out in black, but the rest I can keep in. And it looks pretty cool I think. So hope you enjoyed this. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver from NebulaPhotos.com, Clear Skies.