Geminids

I spent much of last night watching another meteor shower. This time it was the Geminids. I went to my usual spot and set up shop. This time I managed to turn off the interior light of the car so it wouldn't light up to greet me as I went to its rolled-down window to get supplies. (A lot of good that did...many of the people who came to that view point thought nothing of leaving their headlights on for many minutes while they got their chairs and whatnot set up.)

I set the camera to look up into the sky rather than include the horizon as I did for the Persieds. I set the camera to take 16 second exposures and my intervalometer to take a picture every 17 seconds. I made a movie from these pictures (imagine!).

Along the way I caught a fair number of meteors in these pictures. There was a period of about six minutes when I got six meteors in the camera's field of view. So, if six showed up in this part of the sky, imagine how many were visible in the rest of the sky! It was a good night for meteors. Till the clouds moved in.

I used Photoshop to merge the six pictures from this period into one image. You get to see how the meteors do appear to stream out of Gemini. The twins' shoulders are near the top of the image and their feet are above the image.

Six Geminid meteors
December 14, 2010, 12:40-12:
46am

The bright meteor going off the right side of the image doesn't really split along the way. It seems to be a result of Photoshop's rotating the image to align it with the other images that have moved because of the Earth's rotation. I'll learn more about Photoshop to fix that...my attempts were an utter failure.

In the center there are two short streaks passing by the Beehive Cluster in Cancer.

There were a lot of bright meteors visible before midnight while the quarter moon was still shining.

I'm getting too old for staying up past my bedtime. I got comfortable on my portable reclining chair with my heavy wool blanket and kept coming close to falling asleep. So I spent much of the time standing so I wouldn't sleep. But that is a pain in the neck.

Then the wispy clouds moved in. For a while there was just the area around Orion and Canis Major that didn't have clouds. Bright meteors could be seen through the clouds but I was getting discouraged and decided that I'd just go home. So I packed up and left at 2:30.

It turns out that the clouds weren't all that noticeable to my camera. We get to see the clouds near the end and we can see the stars clearly through them. I should have stayed an let the camera get more of the stars, meteors and clouds. The motion of the stars against the motion of the clouds is fascinating and at was just getting underway when I stopped the show.

I had the camera focused better this time. In August I think I didn't have anything bright to focus on and I just cranked the lens to its extreme distance setting. Well, it can focus to infinity and beyond. So the stars in my Perseid movie are somewhat fuzzy. This time they're sharper.

There are airplanes again but not as many as in August. There was a strange searchlight or something shining through the sky. Its range and focus amaze me. I want to know what it is. It shows up at around 0:50.

Be sure to watch in HD. And full screen.

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