Perseid meteor shower 20130812

This years Perseid meteor shower was really good. With the darks sky at Durlston Country Park and few clouds I saw many of them shooting across the sky. Taking a picture of one is quite difficult as although radiate from the north east they seem to appear anywhere in the sky. I found that it was best to point the camera straight up and hope. I took many shots and only managed to capture this one flying past the summer triangle (Vega, Deneb and Altair). Thanks to the dark sky, the image also contains some of the Milky Way which run through the summer triangle. The large dark streak running from Deneb top left to Altair at the bottom is called the Cygnus Rift for obvious reasons.

The Milky Way 20130812

The Wessex Astronomy Society held one of their Astro evenings at Durlston Country Park. Its a nice dark sky, particularly to the south as its right on the cliff tops at Swanage in Dorset. A very big crowd were there to see the Perseid meteor shower which was great but the Milky Way was very noticeable and I could not resist a 30 second RAW exposure at f2.8 ISO 1600.
Its such a treat for me to see it as I live in Poole which is very light polluted.

If you look carefully you will see the constellation of Sagittarius low down in the sky.
Within the constellation are eight bright stars that make up the well known asterism know as the TEAPOT. I've marked it on the image below.
Also in this area is the centre of our galaxy (the Milky Way) which is about 27,000 light years away in the direction marked with a circle containing "MW CENTRE."