Kevin Palmer

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  • The northern lights dance above Deadman's Basin Reservoir while a fireball meteor flies through the sky.
    Aurora and Fireball
  • It was 4AM in the grasslands of southeast Montana. I was spending the night under the stars while my camera clicked away, but the cold breeze made sleep hard to come by. I thought I detected a bright flash of light, but wasn't sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me. It wasn't until I got home that I found the source: a fireball meteor. According to American Meteor Society reports, the meteorite (if it survived) likely fell near the CO/WY border some 300 miles away. It theoretically should have been visible from at least 10 states, I can only imagine how bright it must have been overhead. The green color reveals the composition to be mostly nickel, and it left behind a vapor trail (known as a persistent train) for over 10 minutes afterwards. My only goal was to capture the milky way for the first time this year after it hid behind the sun for the winter. The fireball was just an unexpected bonus.
    One In a Million
  • A bright Perseid meteor burns up in the earth's atmosphere while the milky way stands on end in the west. After finding the nearby campground full, I drove a dirt road up to 10,000 feet until I found a spot flat enough to camp. With no trees up here, there was a great view of the sky and the lights below are from the town of Greybull. Over the 2 nights of the Perseid meteor shower in mid-August I captured nearly 1,000 images with about 10% of them containing meteors. This one was the brightest and the longest, spanning over 15 degrees of sky. I nearly missed it because it was the very first frame of my time lapse. Perseid meteors are made up of small pieces of comet debris that cross the Earth's orbit every year. It is the extreme speed at which it enters the atmosphere (over 100,000 mph) that causes the debris to vaporize and glow. The color of the trail reveals the chemical composition. The green is nickel or magnesium, and the red is ionized oxygen or nitrogen in the upper atmosphere.
    The Longest Streak