Photographer catches exploding meteor in timelapse

Saturday, November 15, 2014, 9:57 AM - Night sky photography is mesmerizing, with or without exploding meteors.

Given how many shots a photographer has to take to put one together, it's amazing we don't see pictures like the one above more often.

Photographer Wes Eisenhauer bagged it outside of Custer, South Dakota, on October 16. Watch it flash briefly into existence, before it explodes and leaves a wisp of slowly-spreading space dust high in the atmosphere.

By chance, it's the second such shot that emerged from that night. The one below was shot by Iowa-based photographer Ben Lewis.

Both were featured on the website of the American Meteor Society, which says they are examples of meteor trains, which are "glowing trails of ionized air molecules" left behind by meteors.

"Most trains last only a few seconds, but on rare occasions a train may last up to several minutes," Vincent Perlerin wrote on the society's website. "A train of this duration can often be seen to change shape over time as it is blown by upper atmospheric winds. Trains generally occur very high in the meteoric region of the atmosphere, generally greater than 80 km ... altitude, and are most often associated with fast meteors."

As for what's in the skies this week, the society says the Leonid meteor showers are blowing back into town. The best time to catch a glimpse of these will be the early morning hours of Monday, November 17, when there may be as many as 10 per hour.

REMEMBER THIS? Watch below for footage of the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia last year.