An image from a few years ago, to complement John Mason's headline article A Great Year for the Perseid Meteor Shower!

I was lying on my 'starlounger' when this Perseid fireball shot across the sky. Very pleased to see it, especially knowing that it had passed through the region monitored by my DSLR camera with 24 mm lens and also by one of my video meteor cameras. Thankfully both camera systems recorded it - a blazing white streak on my video camera, a significantly fainter 'javelin' on the DSLR.

The video software (UFO Analyser) rated it as magnitude -5, which reasonably matched my visual estimate. The fireball left a glowing ionisation train which I could still see for at least 15 seconds.

I saved the DSLR images of the event, slightly adjusted the brightness and contrast (in Paint Shop Pro), then created the attached animated GIF (using Animation Shop). There's 0.5 s between consecutively displayed frames, with each one being a 20 s exposure. The train is twisted and distorted by high altitude winds.

This bright event was seen by a number of observers across the UK. Another series of exposures from tens of km away would have been useful for triangulation to estimate the wind speed at its altitude.