A June Epsilon Cygnid


A wide, long-exposure view of the night sky shows the Milky Way stretching in a hazy, mottled band across the lower half of the frame, with creamy star clouds broken by dark dust lanes. A single bright meteor streaks diagonally from upper left to lower right as a sharp blue-white line that is brightest near its middle and fades at both ends. The background is filled with countless small stars of varying brightness, along with a few larger bluish stars that glow more strongly near the top and bottom of the image.

Gaetan Thibault from Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier, Quebec, Canada

A meteor slices across the Summer Triangle — glowing hot blue as it reaches peak brightness in the center of its trail. This wide-field view combines 21 minutes of total exposure taken with a Canon astrophography DSLR and 20mm lens at f/3.2 (one meteor frame and 20 additional 60-second subexposures with a fog filter). The imager traced the meteor to the June Epsilon Cygnids, a weak meteor shower with a relatively high entry velocity.