Photography by David Wilson.

So you don’t live a 1 to 5 a.m. kind of lifestyle and you missed this week’s epic Perseid Meteor Shower. No sweat, Humboldt is filled with talented photographers who love to share their work.

This awesome time-lapse of the Perseid meteor shower is brought to us by photographer and College of the Redwoods lecturer David Wilson.

Wilson captured these images of the meteor shower on Thursday from the hills of SoHum.

Read more about his experience in the photo description he provided below.

The Perseid Meteor Shower as seen looking north toward Polaris on the night of August 11 from 10:15 p.m. to 3:01 a.m. on August 12. A jackrabbit came to watch, too, and becomes silhouetted against the horizon on the right side about a third of the way through. If you view in HD you might discern a few small meteors that come by in the area above his head. This time-lapse sequence comprises 565 individual high resolution still photographs shot with a digital SLR. Then, much as you would make a flip-book animation, they were assembled into a video that plays them back in order for us at 24 frames per second. It required 12 minutes of real time to make one second of the video, which is why the motion is so fast when played back at 24 stills per second. 

Some of the lights you see whizzing by are airplanes. The meteors flash and disappear, while the planes move across the frame. Why? Because during each 25-second exposure, a meteor appears for maybe a second. It doesn’t appear in the next picture. But an airplane crosses slowly across the entire 25-second exposure, and it is in the next frame as well, and probably in the next and maybe the next. Thus an airplane zooms across the whole field, while the meteor is a single streak, usually not stretching anywhere near across the entire sky.  There are a great many of both in this video, and probably the larger it can be viewed, and in HD, the more one will see.