I stacked seven or eight frames in Starry Landscape Stacker, then I brought the stacked image and the exposure with this explosive meteor into Photoshop, masked off the meteor exposure, and used the brush tool to paint white over the mask just enough to bring the meteor out.

I’ve spent many hours on photography expeditions trying to capture meteors before. But for this, my best image ever, I was outside with the camera for about ten minutes tops. I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to just get up and sit out on our deck a little before 5:30 and set up the tripod and see if I could photo any Leonids. We live in a dark sky spot (for the eastern US anyway), and it’s a good place for night sky photography. Because it was an unplanned session, I didn’t worry about taking a very low-probability approach to meteor photography and shot manually (with a remote) at random intervals. I also didn’t mind the risk of shooting short, 6-second exposures, figuring I’d take a high-risk, high-reward approach and get pinpoint stars that way. Lo and behold about ten exposures into it I clicked the remote shutter button about one second before perhaps the biggest, brightest, most colorful meteor I’ve ever seen blew up in-frame. I took a few more exposures (that all had a red glow where the meteor had been), packed it up, went back inside, and slept like a baby!