Had to pick between a wide-angle and a telephoto for the Perseids this year

I spent two weeks going back and forth on which lens to bring for the meteor shower up at Cherry Springs. Everyone online said go wide to catch the whole sky, so I brought my 14mm f/2.8. Big mistake. The meteors were tiny specks in the frame and the foreground trees took up half the shot. I should have brought my 50mm f/1.8 instead and just pointed it at the radiant point. Got home, looked at the photos, and deleted 90% of them. The one wide shot that sort of worked had a plane trail through it. Has anyone else had better luck with a tighter lens for meteor showers, or am I doing this wrong?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowan8491mo ago

Dude yes, same exact thing happened to me last year. I brought a 16mm thinking I'd get these epic wide shots and just got a bunch of blurry little streaks and a lot of black sky. Ended up cropping so hard on one decent fireball that it looked like garbage.

emma_hart1mo ago

That "bunch of blurry little streaks and a lot of black sky" part hit home hard. I tried a 24mm one year and got basically the same result, a whole night of nothing but faint lines and one airplane. I ended up switching to a 35mm the next night and just framed it on Cassiopeia. Got maybe three decent shots with actual detail in the meteor trails. The tradeoff was missing a couple that I saw out of frame, but what I got was way better than the wide angle mess.