I woud like to share with you the first photo from my December trip to La Palma.
The main goal of this journey was to photograph the Geminids meteor shower.

What followed turned out to be the most difficult and chaotic astrophotography adventure I’ve ever had — and honestly, if I had known in advance what awaited me, I probably wouldn’t have done it again. Under normal circumstances, traveling from Kraków(Poland) to La Palma should take no more than 10 hours. My trip took 25.5 hours — from leaving home at 4:00 a.m. to finally reaching the apartment. Almost five of those hours were spent sitting in a plane at Kraków airport, waiting for the fog to clear before takeoff.

The main culprit behind most of the chaos was Storm Emilia, which had been raging across the Canary Islands for days. I arrived right in the middle of it. Flights were delayed multiple times, and eventually we took off after midnight in conditions that were far worse than earlier. After landing on La Palma, wind gusts reached up to 100 km/h, and I didn’t reach the apartment until after 5:00 a.m. Once there, nearly every night meant driving from one coast of the island to the other in search of a patch of clear sky. The weather changed constantly — rain would force us to pack up the equipment, only to unpack it again minutes later. One night alone, I set up and packed down the gear about seven times. After five nights like this and extreme physical exhaustion, I was close to ending up in the hospital. Only one night was noticeably better — the very night this photo was taken. It was also the second attempt to reach the observatory, which had been completely closed for the first three days due to snowfall.

The main theme of this photo is, of course, the Geminids — one of the most intense and spectacular meteor showers visible from Earth. The meteors were photographed over the course of five nights, between December 13 and 18 (In order to do this I have done about 3000 shoots). They occur when our planet passes through a stream of cosmic debris that burns up in the atmosphere, creating bright “shooting stars.” Quite a few of them can be seen in this image — although at first I thought there were only a handful, a careful review of the data revealed many more than I initially expected.

In the foreground, you can see three massive astronomical telescopes of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, located at an altitude of 2,400 meters above sea level. The arc of the winter Milky Way stretches beautifully from one telescope to another, perfectly blending with the structures in the foreground. The true stars of this image are, once again, the Geminids, whose radiant lies in the constellation Gemini — hence their Latin name, Gemini. This image is a fragment of a huge 360-degree panorama. The full panorama consists of 43 panels, with each panel being a single frame captured with an exposure time of 15 seconds. Also visible is the zodiacal band, crossing the Milky Way and forming an arc similar to it. The zodiacal band is a very faint, diffuse glow visible in the night sky, aligned with the ecliptic — the plane in which the planets of our Solar System orbit. It is caused by sunlight scattered by microscopic grains of interplanetary dust, originating mainly from comet debris and asteroid collisions.

Just above the horizon, a stunning orange-red and green airglow adds an extra layer of magic.
The sky is also filled with numerous hydrogen nebulae, with the largest and most prominent one being, of course, the Orion Nebula..

Date:13-18.12.2025
Place: La Palma / Spain