A skygazer has shared some spectacular photos he took during the Draconid meteor shower last week.
Manmohan Panda was out taking pictures of the annual ‘show’ on Thursday evening (October 8), when the meteor shower was expected to peak.
Named after the constellation of Draco the dragon, the Draconids take place every year and is one of the two meteor showers to light up the skies in October.
The streaks spawn from the comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, which orbits around the sun for six-and-a-half years.
Photos by Manmohan, which were shared into the Watford Observer camera club, show numerous pictures he took during the meteor shower between 9.30pm and 10.30pm stacked together to form star trail images.
Photo credit: Manmohan Panda
This is a type of photograph that uses long exposure times to capture the apparent motion of stars in the night sky due to Earth's rotation.
Manmohan believes that some of the singular dots in the stunning photos could be small meteors, which are made from the fragments of the comet burn up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere - streaking across the night sky as ‘shooting stars’.
He also took a photo of what appears to be one of the ‘shooting stars’ streaking across the sky during Thursday evening.
Photo credit: Manmohan Panda
Anna Ross, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, said: “The number of meteor seen during the peak night varies quite a lot from year to year – usually there will only be around 5-20 meteors per hour visible but some years there have been reports of thousands per hour spotted.”
A second meteor shower, the Orionids, will also take place later this month, peaking on October 22.
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