Processed for lighting and contrast in Lightroom and composited in Photoshop. The base image of the Milky Way with the lake and hills is a single 15 second exposure taken at 11:14pm. The overall image is a 16 image composite, the composite part being the 15 meteors that were photographed during the course of capturing a 600 image time-lapse. The base image contained a 16th meteor. Aside from cloning in the other 15 meteors, the rest of the image is essentially unchanged.

I set out to do a time-lapse of the Milky Way crossing overhead Lake Alder in Washington. I began the imaging process a little after 10pm on the 11th and finished up with over 600 images near 1am on the 12th. It was the peak of the Perseid Meteor shower so even though my camera was pointed south instead of toward the Perseid radiant, I was pretty sure I would capture a few decent meteors over the course of the time-lapse. I would like to have started a little later than I did but the Milky Way wasn't waiting for me and with every passing minute it was moving just a little closer towards the western skies which contained more wildfire haze and more light pollution from Portland and Olympia. When all the processing was completed, I selected an image in the middle of the stream as my base for the composite. Then it was just a matter of finding all the images containing decent meteor captures and closing them into their proper positions in the base image. This image contains 16 Perseid meteors, positioned where they appeared in the southern sky at the height of the 2021 Perseid Meteor Shower between 10:07pm and 12:43pm August 11/12. The base image is a 15 second exposure at ISO 3200, f/2.0.