" .... an affordable wide angle fish eye
lens captured bright Leonids meteors raining down the horizon... from BOA
Observatory Korea -----yKChia Nov 19 2001 "
APART from doing the
Watec 902H video imaging of the Leonids I also tried out fixed tripod wide angle
photography.I bought the 8mm Peleng f/3.5 Russian Lens about a year ago and had not done much with the lens.
I
was curious just how many Leonids could I catch. In addition the distorted view
lend another
unusual look of the sky. The
lens came with a screw mount and Nikon mount.Since I had only
one Nikon camera so it ended up in Nikon FM10 - a manual camera. [ unlike the totally unattended operation of
pre-programmed 6 Canon T-70s array on my the other setups] I stood this camera
together with another Canon EOS 3000 S.L.R fitted with a 15mm f3.5 lens (both needed a cable release
but the latter with auto film rewind) on the same tripod with a
super-plate to support dual cameras. The objective of these wide angle lens pairs was solely for
recording bright very long trails fireball. When the film was developed in 4R I was not at
all impressed. Attempt to use flat bed scanning only introduced ugly mechanical roller mark. Then I ask my
photo savvy coworker for help. He scanned the negatives using a Nikon Coolpix
scanner at 1350 dpi and the results was excellent. I 'rediscover' my 'lost' meteors.
An example was attached here. The cropped image on the right showed
three red color Leonids close to polar star in Camelopardus / Cepheusis border. Clicking
<
large image size 1.2Mb >this will lead you to the original scanned version. Take a look
around the oversize image and you will be amazed by the numbers of
meteors picked up by the 8 mm
lens. In it meteor trains were starting to show on the brighter meteors. There was even a
bright red Leonid that get 'framed' by the a enclosed box structure. Many more were found
hugging the eastern horizon. On the right edge was the white building that housed
BOAO's
1.8 meter reflector. Tell me how many Leonids did you see? [I counted 30!]