Hi all,
I was very privileged to have observed hundreds of Geminids last week from dark skies in Leyburn, and also had a couple of Canon 5DmkIIs capturing time lapse images for half the evening.
I noticed that quite a few of the meteors I imaged had very noticeable persistent trains, such as this:
6.2 MB video
This bright Geminid streak in Cancer was just under 5 degrees long. If you watch the video carefully, you can see a persistent train grow larger and fainter during the video. Each frame was recorded for 10 sec at 35 mm, f/1.4, ISO 6400, and the duration of entire video is 14 min of elapsed time.
I've also created a montage of the time lapse:
2500x1285 montage (2 MB)
The left column shows the raw frames with enhanced contrast; the middle column has the sky background subtracted and then linearly stretched; and the right column has the sky background subtracted, inverted, and then stretched.
Hope you like it. Thanks for looking!
PS: if you look
really carefully at the video, you'll also be able to spot 5 moving satellites, 3 geostationary satellites flaring, and 1 geostationary satellite at constant brightness.