Mike's Astro Photos

I recently bought a new telescope and I used it for the first time Saturday March 6th. I was really having a tough time with it the whole night. Between setup, polar alignment, balancing, tracking and then doing it all over again a few times, I didn’t get much time to do photography. I was really only taking test shots most of the evening and after several hours of frustration and not expecting to have taken any good photos, I chalked the perfectly dark no moon clear night up to a leaning experience. I was eager to review the test shots just to see how the new scope performed. During the session, I took 3 shots of the Flame Nebula to test focusing. While reviewing the photos at the end of the evening, I found this meteor looking streak right through it.

Flame Nebula & Telescopic Meteor

Here’s a zoom-crop of just the meteor part:

Meteor

Here’s an inverted image of the meteor. The variation in light intensity and pixel width (a sign of a meteor) is clear in the inverted picture:

Inverted Image of Meteor

I haven’t gotten confirmation on what this is yet, but I’ve posted the picture to the meteor observing community to get some opinions. If it was in fact a meteor, it would have been a very teeny tiny one, probably the size of a grain of sand. This meteor would not have been visible to the human eye or normal camera lens.