Image #220531

The star clouds and dust lanes of the Milky Way in the regions around the constellation of Sagittarius rises above the trees in this late night image from the backyard.  The center of the Milky Way galaxy also lies in this direction making for a grand view.  This impromptu image came about because of the announcement of a possible meteor shower caused by the broken up remains of Comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3 as the Earth orbited through the debris trail in the early morning hours of 30-31 May.  According to NASA, the anticipated peak of the storm would be around 1AM so at 12:30AM I went outside and promptly saw two meteors streaking across the sky almost side by side.  Hurrying inside, I retrieved my camera gear and set up during which a very bright meteor streaked across the sky.  At this point I started taking 30 second exposures of the sky, a long series of them finally totaling almost 150 images.  Once the shutter was open to record the night sky, not one meteor made an appearance neither to my eye nor to the camera.  So I ended up with a lot of starry images of the night sky sans meteors.  This is one of them.  Next time I am hoping there will be a meteor streaking across the image. And all this on a work night when I have to be up early the next day.