The Perseid Meteor Shower as seen looking north toward Polaris from 10:15 PM on the night of August 11 to 3:01 AM on August 12 in rural Humboldt County, California. A jackrabbit came to watch, too, and briefly becomes silhouetted against the horizon on the right side about half of the way through. If you view in HD you might discern a few small meteors that come by in the area above his head while he's there.

This timelapse sequence comprises 565 individual high resolution still photographs shot with a digital SLR. Then, much as you would make a flip-book animation, they were assembled into a video that plays them back for us at 24 frames per second. It required 12 minutes of real time to make one second of the video, which is why the motion is so fast when played back at 24 stills per second.

Some of the lights you see whizzing by are airplanes. Here's how to tell them apart: The meteors flash and disappear, while the planes move across the frame. Why? Because during each 25-second exposure, a meteor appears for maybe a second. It doesn’t appear in the next picture. But an airplane progresses slowly across the frame during the entire 25-second exposure, and it is in the next frame as well, and probably in the next and maybe the next. Thus an airplane zooms across the whole field, while the meteor is a single streak, usually not stretching anywhere near across the entire sky. There are a great many of both in this video, and probably the larger you can view it, and in HD, the more one will see.