Jupiter and Mars alignment

This photograph features three nocturnal elements: a planetary alignment, the Northern Lights and a meteor shower.

For a night-time photographer, everything comes together in an image like this, and I was simply lucky that the aurora borealis was also visible.

We came for the Perseid meteor shower and were able to see and photograph the Northern Lights for the second time this year. On the right you can see the SAR arc, a phenomenon closely related to the Northern Lights. On the left you can see the glow of the Northern Lights. In the centre of the image you can see Jupiter and Mars, which are very close together; this is known as a planetary conjunction. The lesser-known part of the Milky Way is photographed here in the direction of the radiant of the Perseids.

All the meteor streaks in this image have been aligned so that they appear exactly where they were visible in the sky.

This is a vertical panorama in which I have placed all the meteors that I captured over the course of two days and which fell within the frame.