About a week ago, some friends and I went on a cabin trip into the Norwegian mountains. Among else we wanted to try our hand on night photography. We had planned this trip for months, and brought along tripods, a star-tracker, a dolly for time-lapse photography, several cameras and ourselves – 4 eager photography minded “boys”.

The first evening was almost cloudless, not too cold and actually not too bad at all. So we packed the car, drove to a dark valley going north-south and mounted our equipment. I was still just setting up, testing different exposures and time-setting, and had set the camera for a 5 minute exposure. I was standing there waiting and looking up at the milky way, very visible above us. Two cars came driving through my scene, and while I looked up I saw this shooting star (a meteor) blazing on my right. “Hey look a shooting star!” I shouted. Then right before going behind the mountain it exploded in a bright light. “Wow – it exploded!!” I burst out next. Mouth agape and watching the horizon. I turned to my friends and asked if they had seen it too. They had not.

After a few seconds my mind turned back to the camera and I wondered aloud – “Maybe I got it on camera?”

There was still a couple of minutes to wait before I could have a look, so my friends and I were quite anxious when the camera finally finished with its shot.

And what do you know, right there on the right hand side of the photo, there it is. A green shooting star and a bright explosion. And I was the only one that had a camera pointing just that way. I just wish that I had gotten an even better picture of the sky itself.

Shooting star