Night of the Shooting Stars, Restored version

A year and a half ago I showed you a video of my time watching the 2010 Geminid meteor shower. I mentioned that each meteor appears in only one frame so you don't really get to see many of them unless you happen to be looking at just the right spot at the right time.

I wanted to make a video where the meteors last more than a single frame. I finally decided that I had to learn more about Photoshop so that I could achieve my dream. I found a Photoshop "action" that combines multiple star images into a single image. Here's an example using that action to make an image from the pictures taken from 12:30 to 1:00 that morning.

Thanks to Star Circle Academy for the jumpstart introduction to Photoshop actions!

There are quite a few meteors in this image. Many get lost in the star trails.

The action that produced this image combines all the images in a directory into a single image.

I needed to make images that combined a few consecutive images that shows a frame at its full intensity with each of the previous frames gradually getting dimmer. I tweaked the Star Circle Academy's action by adding steps that dim the previous image when adding a new image to it and saving each iteration. As a result I ended up with the same number of images as the original set but each contains all the previous images that are progressively dimmed.

You'll see what I mean, I hope.

While I was learning about automating Photoshop, I decided that I wanted to add a timestamp to each frame. That meant learning a little about Photoshop's "Document Object Model" to add a Text layer to each image that contains the image's timestamp that was extracted from its metadata.

Anyway, here's the resulting video that shows the meteor shower with the stars, planes and meteors appearing then fading away. You get to see meteors this time. There's a meteor flurry when the timestamp is around "12-14-2010 00:40"!

As always, HD and full-screen viewing is highly recommended!