One setup, two subjects
A wide lens on a tripod pointed at a dark sky is the whole technique, and it gives you two things at once. Left running, it builds a Milky Way image frame by frame, and it catches any meteor bright enough to cross the field while the shutter is open. You are not choosing between them. You set up once and collect both.
That combination is why summer nights are worth the drive. From roughly April to September the Milky Way core rises in the south-east after dark and arcs across the southern sky, and the calendar drops several good showers into the same months. The Perseids are the pick of them, and 2026 is a particularly good year, but nothing on this page needs a shower to be worthwhile. The same settings on any clear, dark, moonless night give you the galaxy.
The Perseids, and what to expect
The Perseids peak on the night of 12–13 August, and in 2026 the peak falls on a new moon. That is as good as conditions get. In an average year the moon washes out all but the brightest meteors; this time the sky stays properly dark all night, and under a good sky the shower can deliver in the region of a meteor a minute at its best.
Rates build through the night. Early on, the radiant, which is the point in Perseus the meteors appear to stream away from, is still low in the north-east, so much of the shower is happening below the horizon. By midnight it is well up, and by the small hours the Earth has rotated to face into the stream head-on. If you can only stay out for part of the night, stay late rather than arriving early. The last two hours before dawn are usually the best of it.
A dark site is the thing that changes everything
Meteors are forgiving. A bright Perseid will punch through a suburban sky and still land on the sensor. The Milky Way is not forgiving, and it is worth planning the night around: under city glow the background is brighter than the galaxy itself, and no amount of processing brings back what the sensor never recorded. Drive an hour out to a properly dark site and the same camera, the same lens and the same settings produce a completely different photograph.
It also pays off for the meteors, because a dark sky lets the fainter ones register instead of vanishing into the background. One decision, both subjects improved. A light pollution map and a bit of planning is all it takes, and it is the highest-value hour you will spend on the whole night.
What to bring
A camera that shoots manual and RAW, the widest and fastest lens you own, and a tripod that will not creep. That is genuinely it. A full-frame body like the Sony A7 III makes life easier because it holds ISO 3200 comfortably, but any camera with manual control will give you both a bright Perseid and a recognisable Milky Way. There is more on the bodies and lenses I use over on the gear pages.
Lens choice is about coverage. A meteor lands somewhere random in the sky, so the more sky you have in frame the better your odds, and a fast aperture matters because the streak is over in a fraction of a second. A 14mm or 18mm at f/2.8 is close to ideal: wide enough to cover a large slice of sky, fast enough to record the meteor, and inexpensive in manual-focus form. It also happens to be the right focal length for fitting the whole Milky Way arc above a landscape. The rest of the kit is small: a spare battery or two, a remote release that locks on, and a lens cloth for the dew.
Settings
Set everything manually and then leave it alone. Autofocus, auto ISO and auto white balance all hunt in the dark, and a consistent set of frames is what lets you stack them later.
| Setting | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Mode | Manual | Nothing should change between frames |
| File | RAW | You will lift shadows heavily later |
| Aperture | f/2.8, wide open | The meteor is instantaneous, so light gathered per instant is what counts |
| ISO | 3200 dark site, 1600–2500 suburban | High enough to record faint trails, low enough to keep the sky from clipping |
| Shutter | 20s at 14mm, 15s at 18mm | Long enough to be efficient, short enough that stars stay points |
| Focus | Manual, on a bright star | Magnify to 100× in live view and nail it, since the infinity mark is not reliable |
| White balance | Manual, around 4000K | Consistent colour across hundreds of frames |
| Long exposure NR | Off | It doubles your dead time, and every gap is a meteor missed |
| Stabilisation | Off | On a tripod it introduces drift rather than removing it |
| Drive | Continuous, remote locked on | Shoot without pause for hours |
How long an exposure before stars trail?
The old rule of thumb divides 500 by the focal length. It dates from film and it is generous for a modern sensor viewed at full size. The NPF rule accounts for aperture and pixel size and gives a stricter answer. Both are plotted below for a 24-megapixel full-frame body at f/2.8.
Composition, and then the easy part
A frame of nothing but sky is a technical record. Put something along the bottom of it, a tree line, a dune ridge, a building edge, a person looking up, and it becomes a photograph. Because you are shooting hundreds of frames from a fixed position, the composition you choose in the first five minutes is the one you keep, so those five minutes are the most valuable of the night. In summer, framing south gives you the Milky Way core rising through the scene while the meteors fall across it.
Then start the intervalometer and stop looking at the camera. Lie back and watch. The camera collects while you enjoy the shower, which is the best trade in photography. Most individual frames will be pure sky, and that is exactly as expected, because they are all quietly contributing to the Milky Way stack. Across a few hours, a handful will have a meteor in them, and one or two of those will be keepers.
Afterwards
You will come home with several hundred near-identical frames, and that is a rich set of data rather than a chore. There are three good things to do with it. Pick the best meteor frame and process it as a wide-field night shot. Composite several meteors onto one sky, which is completely legitimate as long as you say that is what you did. Or stack the whole run into a star trail, a free second image from files you already have. Stacking the frames also cleans up the Milky Way enormously, since averaging many exposures is what removes noise.
All of it processes happily in Siril, and if all you have on the night is the phone in your pocket, that works too.