Even though it is the Middle of Summer in the Middle East, I was itching to get out for another photography adventure. I decided to head to Sir Baniyas Island in the hope that I might be far enough away from city lights to photograph the peak of the Perseids Meteor Shower. Absolutely nothing there to speak of except an outcrop of rich mineralisation including hematite, salt, gypsum, sulphur (yep, you can see big chunks of sulphur sticking out of the ground) copper and magnesium to name a few.
The Sheikh, back in the day, decided to turn it into a wildlife sanctuary and planted the entire ~48km² reserve with trees which are 24 hours fully irrigated with over 120,000km of irrigation piped in from the mainland desalination plants.
All of the animals are imported and breed freely. There are a couple of native animals such as the Arabian Gazelle and Arabian Oryx. They also have Hyenas, Cheetahs, Ostrich, Emu, that big herd is Eland (Africa’s largest antelope).
Perseids were definitely there! But you have to look closely.
Sequence at 3:02 is where the main event is happening which is a time-lapse taken over three hours. And then the final still image at the end is a 15 image composite shot of all the best meteors on the one image. That took quite a while to stitch together!
I took another time-lapse the next night to get a star trail animation around Polaris, just for giggles.
You can catch the full, 2 episode vlog of the adventure on my video page.