August 13, 2015 Milky Way meteors from San Nick

On this evening I was stationed out on San Nicolas Island, during a week-long stint as weather observer at its Navy airport.  This small desert island is about 65 miles SSW of Malibu.  There is little-to-no light pollution nearby, except for the little settlement on the island called “Nicktown.”  To the south, the next landmass is Antarctica, so the sky is especially dark in that direction.  The mid-summer Milky Way was quite stunning towards the south, so I lugged my camera and tripod a quarter-mile or so south of Nicktown to take some long exposures.  This was also during the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, so I hoped to catch some of those, too.

I managed to get a couple of meteors in my hour-long shoot.  The foreground here is illuminated by the lights of Nicktown, and the glow towards the right must be due to nighttime operations on the southwest shore of the island, a few miles distant.