Lyrid meteor shower - Apr 22, 2015

Wanting to prepare for the best meteor shower, the Persiads, I wanted to fiddle with camera settings using the Lyrids to see what kinds of settings I actually needed for optimal results. It seems that ISO 400 to 1000 is optimal coupled with about a 2- to 10-second exposure with the aperture around f/2.8 to f/5 and the widest wide angle lens you can get. For this, where they're around magnitude +1 or so, a long exposure provides the best results, but there also needs to be considerable sensitivity. It seems that a 5-second exposure at ISO 640 with an f/4 aperture provides the best results. My only limitation is that I live in the middle of a city (a medium-sized one that just barely gets 6-figure residents) and I have no way to get out of it. Thus, I'm stuck with sky glow which limits my ability to capture better detail, especially the fainter details.

In this 4K video, compiled from a large number of photos I took, I start off with f/4 for the aperture then later on go with f/3.3. Test photos are excluded. I also discovered that I could use the time lapse feature to get a bunch of continuous photos without having to hold down the shutter button in burst mode. Burst mode has the advantage of having a very short gap between photos but it results in the jitter you see. Time lapse is fully automatic, eliminating the jitter, but there's a 1-second delay (it won't let you choose 0 or anything in between) so it kind of creates gaps.

Still, either way, I captured 3 suspicious objects, one of which I can confirm as a meteor, the others, seen first thing, I don't know what they are.