Eta Aquarid Meteor, Milky Way and Reflection

A few days ago I suggested that you could go out in the early morning hours, look east, and look for meteors from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower.  All week we've had storms here, so I wasn't able to look for it myself.  Yesterday morning, I finally had my chance.  I did capture many meteors, but mainly as the apparent source, or radiant point, of the meteor shower rose above the horizon starting around 2:40 am.  

Then reviewing my shots I saw this one earlier, around 12:23 am.  Was it an Eta Aquarid?  Meteors could come shooting up over the horizon a couple of hours before the radiant point in the constellation Aquarius rose, but I think that was going to occur more centered in this picture.  So the trail of an Eta Aquarid meteor should be pointing down and to the left, towards a point below the center, almost 90 degrees from this one's path.  So although this one appears to the observing camera to be roughly in the sky where many of the meteors did show up 2 to 3 hours later, it doesn't appear to be from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower.  Random meteors happen.

Well, Eta Aquarid meteor or not, this meteor's timing was great, streaking through the Milky Way while the lake was calm enough to provide an only slightly blurry reflection of it.  It's interesting to notice that the star reflections blur towards the camera as slight waves come towards shore in this long exposure, but the path of the meteor is more erratic because it doesn't stay still as waves make the reflecting surface also move.  Too often you'll see a photo with a perfect mirror reflection of the stars.  Can an entire lake be a perfectly flat mirror for the 30 seconds typically required to capture a star shot like this?  A small puddle perhaps, and a reflection in a lake looks mirror smooth for a short sunset exposure, but over the course of a long exposure, lake surfaces move.  I haven't seen a real lake provide a Photoshop-like mirror surface for a long dark sky exposure, but I hope I live long enough to see that night.

Here's a blog post I wrote a while back describing how to capture Milky Way images like this one:
Producing Milky Way Images
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2011/05/producing-milky-way-images.html

Join me June 29 for a Milky Way photography workshop in Bodie State Historic Park with fellow award-winning astrophotographer Steven Christenson: http://activesole.blogspot.com/p/bodie-night-photography-workshops-2013.html

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