Every August, the Perseids show up and remind casual stargazers why they fell in love with the night sky in the first place. This year they’re peaking under a new moon on the nights of August 12–13, 2026, which means the sky will be as dark as it gets and the meteors will actually be visible instead of washed out by moonlight. If you’ve ever wanted to try catching one on camera instead of just watching it streak by, this is about as good a shot as you’ll get for several years.
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Meteor photography has a reputation for being technical, and in a sense it is — you’re basically betting a 20 or 30 second exposure on the chance that something streaks through your frame. But the actual camera settings involved are simple enough that a first-timer can get usable shots on the first night out. The hard part is patience, not technique.
The Perseids are active for weeks before and after their peak, but the peak nights are when the numbers jump — under good conditions, observers can see 90 or more meteors per hour once you’re away from city lights. What makes 2026 unusual is the timing: the new moon falls right on the peak, so there’s zero moonlight to compete with. According to EarthSky’s Perseid guide, this pairing of peak activity with a dark sky is exactly the kind of setup that produces the memorable years — the ones people bring up again a decade later.
If you already read our guide to this summer’s meteor showers, you know the viewing basics. This post is specifically about pointing a camera at the sky instead of just your eyes.
You don’t need a telescope for this — in fact, a telescope is the wrong tool entirely, since meteors move fast and cover wide swaths of sky that a narrow field of view will miss almost every time. What you do need is:
A camera with manual mode. Any DSLR or mirrorless camera works. Even some higher-end smartphones with a dedicated “astro” or long-exposure night mode can capture bright meteors now, though a real camera will out-perform a phone every time.
A wide-angle lens. Something in the 14mm–24mm range on a full-frame camera (or the equivalent field of view on crop sensor) lets you cover more sky, which matters more than you’d think — you’re photographing a shower, not a single predictable object, so a wider frame means better odds of catching something.
A sturdy tripod. Non-negotiable for exposures longer than a fraction of a second. Our accessories guide covers tripods and mounts that hold steady in the kind of light breeze you’ll often get on a summer night.
A remote shutter or intervalometer. Pressing the shutter button by hand introduces just enough shake to soften an otherwise sharp shot, and more importantly, an intervalometer lets the camera shoot continuously all night without you standing over it for every single frame.
Extra batteries. Long exposures running for hours will drain a battery faster than you’d expect, especially if it’s a cool night.
Start here and adjust from what you see on the back of the camera — every sensor behaves a little differently in the dark:
Mode: Full manual (M), both exposure and focus.
Aperture: As wide open as your lens allows — f/2.8 is ideal, f/4 is workable. A wider aperture means more light hits the sensor in the same amount of time, which matters because meteors themselves last less than a second.
ISO: Start around ISO 800 and check your results. If the sky looks too dark, push it to 1600 or 3200; if it’s too noisy or the background sky is glowing from light pollution, pull it back down.
Shutter speed: 15–30 seconds is the sweet spot. Long enough to gather light, short enough that stars don’t smear into obvious trails (unless you want that look). NASA’s own guide on how to photograph a meteor shower notes that most cameras can handle a 30-second exposure before noise becomes a real problem, which lines up with what we’ve found in practice.
Focus: Manual, set to infinity. Autofocus will hunt and fail in the dark almost every time. The easiest trick is to focus during daylight on a distant object, tape the focus ring in place, and leave it there after dark — or use your camera’s live view zoomed in on a bright star to fine-tune focus by eye.
File format: RAW if your camera supports it. It gives you far more room to recover shadow detail and adjust white balance afterward than a compressed JPEG will.
It’s tempting to aim straight at the radiant — the point in the constellation Perseus that the meteors appear to stream from — but that’s actually the wrong move. Meteors near the radiant look short and stubby because they’re heading almost straight toward you. The longer, more dramatic streaks show up farther from the radiant. A good rule of thumb is to frame your shot so the radiant sits near one edge of the frame, roughly 40–60 degrees away from your main point of focus, giving the meteors room to stretch across the image.
It also helps to include something in the foreground — a treeline, a hill, a barn, anything with a recognizable silhouette. A frame of pure sky can look impressive if you catch a bright meteor, but a foreground element gives the shot scale and makes it feel like a place rather than a stock photo. And obviously: get away from city lights if you can. Check our stargazing guide for tips on finding darker skies near you — the difference in both meteor visibility and image quality between a suburban backyard and a truly dark site is enormous.
Meteor rates climb steadily after midnight and peak in the hours before dawn, since that’s when your location on Earth is facing into the “windshield” of debris the planet is plowing through. Plan to be out from around midnight until first light on the mornings of August 12th and 13th for the best chance.
Set your intervalometer to fire continuously — say, a 25-second exposure with a 1-second gap between frames — and let it run. Don’t chase individual meteors by watching the sky and trying to time your shutter; you’ll miss most of them and tire yourself out. Let the camera do the boring work of shooting all night, then go through the frames afterward to find the keepers.
Give your eyes at least 20 minutes to adjust to the dark before you expect to see much with them directly, and avoid checking your phone screen at full brightness — it’ll reset your night vision each time. Dress warmer than you think you need to; even summer nights get cold once you’re sitting still for hours. If you’re shooting somewhere humid, a simple dew heater strip or even a rubber band and a hand warmer wrapped around your lens barrel will keep condensation from creeping onto the glass halfway through the night.
The most frequent one is leaving autofocus on and never checking that shots are actually sharp until reviewing them the next morning — always zoom in on your first few frames in the field to confirm focus before committing hours of shooting to a soft image. The second is using too narrow a lens; a 50mm or telephoto lens will feel like it’s “getting closer” to the action, but it actually shrinks your odds of framing a meteor at all. The third is giving up too early — most people who say meteor photography “didn’t work” only tried for twenty minutes. Cameras that run for three or four hours straight will usually come home with at least a few solid captures, even on an average night, and this year’s dark sky stacks the odds further in your favor.
If you’re new to night sky photography in general and want the fundamentals before jumping into something as fast-moving as a meteor shower, our astrophotography for beginners guide and the broader astrophotography hub are good places to build up the basics of exposure, focus, and gear before the big night.
No. Any camera with a true manual mode and the ability to hold a 15–30 second exposure will work, including many entry-level DSLRs and mirrorless bodies from the last decade. The lens matters more than the camera body — a wide, fast lens on a modest camera will usually outperform a great camera with a narrow or slow lens.
You can try, and some newer phones with a dedicated night or astrophotography mode have genuinely surprised us with bright fireball captures. But phone sensors are small and struggle with the combination of speed and darkness that meteors demand, so treat it as a bonus attempt rather than your main plan if you’re serious about results.
The Perseids stay active for roughly two weeks on either side of the peak, just at lower rates, so a cloudy night on August 12th or 13th isn’t the end of it. Check the following few nights, and don’t rule out the pre-dawn hours a few days after the peak — you’ll see fewer meteors, but a dark, clear sky beats a cloudy peak night every time.
However many frames you come home with, the process itself is a genuinely good way to spend a summer night — camera clicking away while you actually watch the sky instead of a viewfinder. That, honestly, might be the best part of the whole exercise.
