Geminids - great display last night

[OzEclipse (Joe Cali)]

Great display last night. I'm happy with the photographic results but sitting in my back yard with a mate on reclining camp chairs for a few hours watching slow burn, sky crossing, long persistence meteors was pretty amazing.

Photographically, I captured 252 images each of 40s exposure, ISO 3200, 14mm f2.8 lens over 3 hrs between 12:30UT - 15:43UT [11:30pm-2:43 am local time]

1) 30 subs without meteors were median stacked to create the background starfield.
2) 42 subs showed moving objects. Of these 42, 24 frames were identified as aircraft or satellites by velocity/duration analysis.
3) 18 frames contained one or sometimes two meteors. The stars in these frames have been aligned with the background star field and then each frame was masked to include only the meteor track.
4) Meteors with trajectories aligned to the Geminid radiant just near Castor have been labelled with a G.
5) Other unlabelled meteors are either space junk or random meteors not in the orbit of the Geminids.

[MortonH]

That's very cool.

[AstralTraveller (David)]

That's great! You have a great view from your backyard, city-bound observers would be lucky to see even a couple of meteors. Nice image processing too.

[seeker372011 (Narayan)]

Brilliant! And there I was claiming meteor showers are mythical

[OzEclipse (Joe Cali)]

Thank you David and Morton!

Hi Narayan,

Originally Posted by seeker372011

Brilliant! And there I was claiming meteor showers are mythical

The debris trail from the parent bodies isn't homogeneous. Clusters of various densities of debris travel the orbit. Even in one year's shower, different latitudes and especially longitudes can experience radically different shower rates. I have had more than my share of disappointments but occasional successes make the effort worthwhile.

Even though I picked up a decent number of meteors in this shot, there were 2-3 times that number observed visually, roughly 50-60 per hour at peak after midnight tapering either side of that but visible all night.

Most of the bigger showers have the shower radiants at north declinations and so the observing geometry favours northern hemisphere observers.

Joe

[AstroViking (Steve)]

Well done Joe.

I'm quite jealous, as all I got to see was clouds...

[leon]

Nice captures Joe, you certainly managed to get a decent number of them well done.

Leon

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Beautiful Joe!

[Hemi]

Brilliant! Well done and thanks for breaking down the aquisition process.

[Dave882 (David)]

Fantastic shot!