Leonids
2001 @BOAO, Korea
My Venture into
Wide Angle 8 mm Meteor Photography
yKChia
Nov 28 01 Version 1.1
APART from doing the watec video imaging
of the L
eonids
I also tried out fixed tripod wide angle photography. I bought
the 8mm Peleng Russian Lens about a year ago and had not
done much with the lens. I was curious just how many Leonids could I catch.
In addition the distorted view added another unusal look of the sky. The
lens came with a screw mount and Nikon mount. Since I had only one Nikon
camera so it ended up in Nikon FM10 - a manual camera. [ unlike the
totally unattended operation of pre-programmed 6 Canon T-70s array on
my the other setups] I stood this camera together with another
Canon EOS 3000 SLR fitted with a 15mm f3.5 lens(both needed a cable release
each but the latter with auto film rewind) on the same tripod with
a super-plate to support dual cameras. The objective of these
wide angle lens pairs was solely for recording bright very long trails
fireball. When the film was developed in 4R I was not at all impressed.
Attempt to use flat bed scanning only introduced ugly mechanical roller
mark. Then I ask my foto savy coworker for help. He scanned the negatives
using a Nikon Coolpix scanner at 1350 dpi and the results was excellent.
I rediscover my 'lost' meteors. An example was attached here. The cropped
image on the right showed three red Leonids close to polar star in
Camelopardus / Cepheusis border. CLICKing < large image size
1.5Mb >this will lead you to the original scanned version. Take
a look around the oversize image and you will be amazed by the numbers
picked up by the 8 mm lens. In it trains were starting to show on the
brighter meteors. There was even a bright red Leonid that get 'framed'
inside enclosed box structure. Many more were found hugging the eastern
horizon. On the right edge was the white building that housed BOAO's 1.8
metre reflector. Tell me how many Leonids did you see? [I
counted 30!] Watch this page ( as well as linked pages for more update
)
eonids
I also tried out fixed tripod wide angle photography. I bought
the 8mm Peleng Russian Lens about a year ago and had not
done much with the lens. I was curious just how many Leonids could I catch.
In addition the distorted view added another unusal look of the sky. The
lens came with a screw mount and Nikon mount. Since I had only one Nikon
camera so it ended up in Nikon FM10 - a manual camera. [ unlike the
totally unattended operation of pre-programmed 6 Canon T-70s array on
my the other setups] I stood this camera together with another
Canon EOS 3000 SLR fitted with a 15mm f3.5 lens(both needed a cable release
each but the latter with auto film rewind) on the same tripod with
a super-plate to support dual cameras. The objective of these
wide angle lens pairs was solely for recording bright very long trails
fireball. When the film was developed in 4R I was not at all impressed.
Attempt to use flat bed scanning only introduced ugly mechanical roller
mark. Then I ask my foto savy coworker for help. He scanned the negatives
using a Nikon Coolpix scanner at 1350 dpi and the results was excellent.
I rediscover my 'lost' meteors. An example was attached here. The cropped
image on the right showed three red Leonids close to polar star in
Camelopardus / Cepheusis border. CLICKing < large image size
1.5Mb >this will lead you to the original scanned version. Take
a look around the oversize image and you will be amazed by the numbers
picked up by the 8 mm lens. In it trains were starting to show on the
brighter meteors. There was even a bright red Leonid that get 'framed'
inside enclosed box structure. Many more were found hugging the eastern
horizon. On the right edge was the white building that housed BOAO's 1.8
metre reflector. Tell me how many Leonids did you see? [I
counted 30!] Watch this page ( as well as linked pages for more update
) My Watec-902H Leonids
Video Count
My Six Canon - T70 with f/1.8 50 mm lens
Set up