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This from the BAA:
The Geminid meteor shower is now underway, with peak activity expected throughout the coming weekend..
The Geminids are the richest of the annual meteor showers, with rates outstripping those of the Perseids for a 24-hour interval centred on their 14 December maximum. The peak this year coincides with a last quarter Moon in Virgo, so there should be comparatively little interference by moonlight even during the early morning hours. The highest observed rates are most likely during the night of December 13/14, particularly in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, December 14, and conveniently during a weekend.
This year, Geminid maximum is expected at around 07h on Sunday, 14th December, when the peak Geminid Zenithal Hourly Rate may reach 120 m/h. There is the added bonus of an increased proportional abundance of bright events after maximum; past observations show that bright Geminids become more numerous some hours after the rates have peaked, a consequence of particle-sorting in the meteor stream.
The Geminid maximum is quite broad so it is important to have a spread of observers making observations throughout the nights of 12th/13th, 13th/14th and on 14th/15th December to ensure adequate coverage of the shower maximum. In addition, observations by BAA members in North America and the Far East will be welcomed by the Meteor Section to improve coverage of the period of peak shower activity.
The Geminid radiant (at RA 07h 32m Dec +33o, just north of Castor) rises early in the evening and reaches a respectable altitude well before midnight, so observers who are unable to stay up late can still contribute useful watches.
Meteor showers are supposed to come from periodic comets, yet there is no very short period comet that matches the orbit of the Geminid meteoroid stream. Instead, the orbit of the Geminids is occupied by an object called 3200 Phaethon, which looks remarkably like a rocky asteroid. A group of astronomers led by David Jewitt of UCLA have been using NASA's STEREO probes to take a closer look at 3200 Phaethon when it passes closest to the Sun. In 2010 one of the STEREO probes recorded a doubling of Phaethon's brightness as it approached the Sun, as if sunlight were shining through a cloud of dust around the asteroid.
The observers began to suspect 3200 Phaethon was something new - a "rock comet" which is, essentially, an asteroid that approaches so close to the Sun that solar heating scorches dusty debris right off its rocky surface forming a tail of rocky grains. Seeing 3200 Phaethon sprout a tail, even a small one, provides some confidence that Phaethon is indeed the source of the Geminids - but a mystery remains: How can such a stubby protuberance produce such a grand meteor shower? Only time and further continued observations may provide the answer.
Geminid meteors enter the atmosphere at a relatively slow 35 km/sec, and thanks to their robust (rocky/asteroidal as opposed to dusty/cometary) nature tend to last longer than most in luminous flight. Unlike swift Perseid or Orionid meteors, which last only a few tenths of a second, Geminids may be visible for a second or longer, sometimes appearing to fragment into a train of 'blobs'. Their relatively low speed and the abundance of bright events makes the Geminids a prime target for imaging.
For further information, or copies of report forms, observing notes, and details of how to carry out group meteor watches, please visit the BAA Meteor Section website at http://britastro.org/meteor
This e-bulletin issued by:
John W. Mason, Director, BAA Meteor Section
2014 December 10
Posted : 11/12/2014 11:22 am
Thanks Mike, I had actually planned to camp yesterday and this Saturday in Brede. I abandoned yesterday because of the gusts predictions. Saturday looks like we are clear of the jet stream and also clear skies predicted. I really have my fingers crossed for a good show! It will be my third, the first was in Cudham for the Persieds with you guys in September, the second was when I camped for the first time, madly in gale force winds for the Orionids which turned out to be a complete no-show!
Posted : 11/12/2014 11:38 am
Hellooo!
Did you catch any?
Here are some of mine!
IMG_9489.jpg by Sumitra_S, on Flickr
Which made it into Sky News, thanks to the lovely Tasco Dave (David Woods from Hants Astro) 🙂
http://news.sky.com/story/1391602/geminid-meteor-lights-up-the-night-skies
Here's a close up!
IMG_9489.jpg by Sumitra_S, on Flickr
I have found a couple of others, smaller ones which I will post soon!
Posted : 14/12/2014 1:35 pm
Sure did, Sumitra! But first...Wonderful capture! Of course it will make the news, you are a star photographer! I must learn how to frame like you. Love how the windmill is facing Orion and that meteor heading for it 🙂
I have my own story of last night. The Cudham Perseids shower in September with you guys was my first experience and was nice, I think i bagged about 6-7 meteors that evening, that was cool. My second, The Orionids turned out to be one big spectacular NONE event as made a special camping trip in gale force winds just for that!
But Yesterday, WOW WOW WOW, what a show that was!!! I beat my september meteor watch of 7 meteor in just the first quarter of an hour!
But let me backtrack as I am jumping the gun in all my excitement as I just arrived back home just now from a very unassuming, remote little place called Brede.
I went there to attempt my second ever tent camping specially for this Geminids event...naturally, i was not just the only mad camper on the site, i was the only camper on site.
I chose this campsite in particular by using this excellent campsite finder site, that gives a wide range of criterias
I selected a criteria as follows:
South east england.
Open all year.
Public transport accessible.
Toilets
This narrowed down the options to several sites.
I then checked each campsite location with this extremely useful dark sky simulator
http://www.need-less.org.uk/images/ukatnightsim.swf
Out of the selection, a campsite in Brede showed a light pollution grade of 5.32 which is comparable to romney marsh.
The reason I choose to camp rather than rent a b&b which i would normally love to do is for several reasons:
1. B&bs are full on a weekend at short notice. I dont have to book a tent pitch in advance during the winter knowing that no sane person would do such a thing. This is important because i dont have to be committed if the weather is terrible for stargazing unlike with a b&b booking.
2. If i am to get to dark sites regularly, b&bs will clock up a lot of expense compared to camping which is usually just a tenner a night.
3. Campsites usually have a nice open space for stargazing. Though some b&bs have some nice large open fields but they tend to be more expensive.
4. Tenting is a useful skill to develop for times when I need to quickly escape to the wilderness during an apocalypse or zombie infested cities ...Im stretching my justification arent I?
So those are my reasons and during the last few days, I planned for a timelapse overnight session. This involved purchasing a battery grip and a couple more batteries for my camera. While having the timelapse going through the night I had also planned to do some deep space imaging but i needed another camera, so I went and bought a second hand canon dslr 1100d for that 🙂 as I always use my laptop for all my live capture photography on a dslr, I needed to prepare another laptop I had with the appropriate canon capture software needed.
So for the camping I packed my heq5 pro mount and 80mm apo refractor with the laptops, cameras and camping gear.
I called the campsite before leaving to be sure they still had a tent pitch available to which they sounded surprised to be having a customer.
It so happens that the they have an 8" celestron nexstar telescope, exactly the same one i have! But they couldn't ever get it to align and just gave up.
So I offered to help them as soon as I setup my timelapse going. By now I think I can call myself a reasonable expert at aligning a Nexstar but for some reason their telescope just won't align despite levelling it and entering the correct location details etc. So I told them I want to try a factory reset on it which they said go ahead as they abandoned it anyway. So I did just that and hey presto, it aligned successfully first time and beautifully tracked the celestial objects. They were of course delighted. And so I took the campsite family owners on a tour of the skies with whatever knowledge I had. And boy, there was plenty to show them for that dark sky simulator certainly got this one right as their skies was ablaze with starlight. There are of course hints of light pollution in certain directions but for a rural area it was a fabulous luxury for me as the milkyness of our galaxy flaunted itself proudly arching overhead from east to west.
Of course the main reason I was there was for the meteor shower and I convinced the family to enjoy the show with me and they were absolutely delighted as much as I was with the spectacular show that we were treated to. I was quite overwhelmed by it myself. They brought out delicious home made snacks and beers as we we saw Shooting stars galore which i explained to the children were not actually stars but very tiny remnants from a comet, mostly the size of a grain of sand, hitting our atmosphere at such high velocities that at impact they burn up brightly, a three year old stared at me rather blankly but...well I dont want to give them the wrong information, do I?!
Of course once again i carried a whole lot of gear that i never ended up using, yep i never did set up that refractor as i spent my whole evening chilling out with the family who in turned were so grateful for my help and knowlegde that they put me in a lovely private room shed that had a woodfire stove, and a skyline window to the stars, through which i saw a final goodnight encore of 3-4 meteors bowing at 3am--ish 🙂
So not only did I not need to have brought my telescope system but I didnt even need my camping gear either! A camera, tripod and laptop was all I ended up using.
So an absolutely wonderful night in all ways. The campsite owners family bid me goodnight at 1am as they thanked me for an enjoyable evening, almost as if I owned that telescope, had conjured up the meteor showers and it was my house and they were my guests. Before they went indoors, though, jupiter had jealously crept up in the sky eager to steal some attention from us away from the meteor showers which seemed to top off the night for the family. It wasn't over for me yet as I stayed out for another 2-3 hours enjoying an extended show and I had set up the camera at different spots every couple hours as I accumulated about 8 hours of night sky shots, (started shooting since 6pm!) There is so much to process and i have just got home. With all this chatting on this post, i cant not post up at least one frame so as Sumitra has done, here is one example frame i just spotted from the beginning set of my frames taken around 6pm and as you can see the show started as soon as the sun set! 3 meteors in just this one frame, i cant wait to see what else i have caught during the rest of the evening.
Oh i cranked up the iso to 6400, i dont care about noise, i just want me some shooting stars as a memento 🙂 The exposure I did were 15 seconds with 4 second rests.
The timelapse wont be smooth because one huge drawback for the night was that the night was so frosty and humidity was apparently at a very challenging 94%. Although I actually had a dew heater band around my lens, it seems it was so frosty that my dew controller died on me and so I had to keep using a hair dryer to manually clear the dew every 15 minutes which often i forget to do so there were long sessions of very dewed up images 🙁
But doesnt matter. the meteor shower was an incredible experience which i got to share unexpectedly with a lovely enthusiastic family as a bonus and against a glorious backdrop of the Milky Way, Orion and other constellations.
Man what a show.
Posted : 14/12/2014 7:35 pm
Topic starter
Here are some of mine!
The picture of the meteor over the windmill is superb. Thoroughly deserves the wider audience that it's getting today!
I have my own story of last night
And what a story it is, Tej. Fantastic. It sounds like you had a wonderful time. Thanks for sharing this. Great that you managed to fix their telescope as well!
I was in Whitstable last night for the Geminids and saw a great show. At least two-dozen in the hour or so that I was watching... before conditions got too cold! I didn't bother with a camera. It was so cold and there was so much moisture in the air that the lens would have been covered in dew almost instantly. Rather than worry about this, I thought I'd sit back and enjoy the meteors visually. Very glad that I did.
3 meteors in just this one frame, i cant wait to see what else i have caught during the rest of the evening
That's an interesting capture Tej, but I'm not sure that they are all Geminids. Only one (on the left hand side) seems to be coming from anywhere near the radiant. The other two are in completely different directions to the radiant, so they may just be sporadic meteors. Are you certain that they are meteors and not satellites? They don't display the classic profile of the light fading in and then out again. Might be an idea to check the frames before and after this shot to see if there is a continuation of the "line".
Sorry to cast doubt... it just doesn't look quite right to me! I could easily be wrong, believe me.
Posted : 14/12/2014 8:06 pm
The picture of the meteor over the windmill is superb. Thoroughly deserves the wider audience that it’s getting today!
Thanks Mike, Much much appreciated 🙂
It was a lovely time as well, I had 2 people from the camera club with me. I kept it low key to be able to take photos myself (I couldn't take many the last two workshops but the moon was up so I did not mind so much).
One of them caught a very lengthy Geminid and was delighted. The other did other things like trying to get the milky way and Andromeda Galaxy. It is so rewarding to show them how to take such pictures.
Sure did, Sumitra! But first…Wonderful capture! Of course it will make the news, you are a star photographer! I must learn how to frame like you. Love how the windmill is facing Orion and that meteor heading for it
Thank you Tej!! Very kind!! 🙂 I sometimes get afraid people will get bored of the windmill :p
The other person has a Geminid about to strike the Windmill in a much more obvious way, and she was in Portrait too I think. I can't wait for her to upload it.
That sounds like a wonderful and memorable evening!!
That’s an interesting capture Tej, but I’m not sure that they are all Geminids.
I was also about to comment something similar. At first (before reading your post) I thought you might have done a composite without de-rotating the sky as they were every which way but read and you said it was all in the same shot, so I became confused again...
Posted : 14/12/2014 8:16 pm
That’s an interesting capture Tej, but I’m not sure that they are all Geminids. Only one (on the left hand side) seems to be coming from anywhere near the radiant. The other two are in completely different directions to the radiant, so they may just be sporadic meteors. Are you certain that they are meteors and not satellites? They don’t display the classic profile of the light fading in and then out again. Might be an idea to check the frames before and after this shot to see if there is a continuation of the “line”.
Sorry to cast doubt… it just doesn’t look quite right to me! I could easily be wrong, believe me.
If you say they are satellites then they are satellites! I wont doubt you for a second, I have to learn how to distinguish...at least I have learnt how to eliminate aeroplanes, lol.
So ok, will check some more frames and see what I find. They have to emanate from Gemini to be a genuine Geminid then, right? I did know this and even explained that to the family but we saw shooting stars all over the place so I dont what the heck to think. Apparantly, according to my meteor shower app, there are other meteor showers hapening at the same time, Puppid-Velids, Monocerotids, Hyrids, Comae Bereicids, and Leonid Minorids!
Posted : 14/12/2014 8:19 pm
Topic starter
They have to emanate from Gemini to be a genuine Geminid then, right?
Absolutely, the radiant is just above Castor. That's why I'm worried about all three lines. Even the one on the left looks angled slightly too high, but at least it's in the general direction.
Apparantly, according to my meteor shower app, there are other meteor showers hapening at the same time, Puppid-Velids, Monocerotids, Hyrids, Comae Bereicids, and Leonid Minorids!
Didn't know about all of these! So, there could be a sporadic meteor amongst them. As I say, best check the frames before and after, and also look at the light profile of the line. If you look at the meteor line close-up in Sumitra's image, you'll see what I mean.
Posted : 14/12/2014 8:33 pm
I'm on ITV News!!! http://www.itv.com/news/2014-12-14/sky-watchers-brave-icy-conditions-to-capture-geminid-meteor-shower/
Don't worry, I've told Tasco Dave that I'm merely sharing my HolyAstroClone of myself as can't be poached from Flamsteed AS 😉
Posted : 14/12/2014 9:33 pm
OOOOH AAAAH OOOOH
Sky-watchers brave cold to capture dazzling Geminid meteor shower. Picture by @Hazel_Faery http://t.co/zIkyikuTXk pic.twitter.com/oLNmyOt4wf
— ITV News (@itvnews) December 14, 2014
<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" async="" charset="utf-8"></script>
Posted : 14/12/2014 9:36 pm
Here's a composite of my 4 brightest Geminids!
That was such hardwork to do with shooting East and not having a Polaris anywhere close at all outside my frame like I had for the Perseids.
So it's not as precise as my Perseid composite, but will have to do! My screen suffered from me scribbling on it with a pencil again. What won't we do for Astrophotography! 😉
Composite Geminid 2014 Rottingdean Windmill
by Sumitra_S, on Flickr
Posted : 15/12/2014 12:47 am
OK, I think I have the knack for identifying meteors. I think these two meteors (one is very faint going across the milk way) are both Geminids (they dont appear in the frames delineating this one). Both emanating from Gemini...though in different directions. Altogether I found about 17-18 images with meteors on them but I am not going to attempt what Sumitra has done with overlaying all the meteors (which btw is brilliant)...that's way too advance for me right now! Next step I want to try is to attempt processing my first timelapse as I think I have enough workable images to play around with 🙂
Btw gosh, the light pollution is still heavy when I look at the photos. But it did look nice and dark enough for a rural area while I was there.
Posted : 15/12/2014 3:21 pm
OK, I think I have the knack for identifying meteors. I think these two meteors (one is very faint going across the milk way) are both Geminids (they dont appear in the frames delineating this one). Both emanating from Gemini...though in different directions. Altogether I found about 17-18 images with meteors on them but I am not going to attempt what Sumitra has done with overlaying all the meteors (which btw is brilliant)...that's way too advance for me right now! Next step I want to try is to attempt processing my first timelapse as I think I have enough workable images to play around with 🙂
Btw gosh, the light pollution is still heavy when I look at the photos. But it did look nice and dark enough for a rural area while I was there.
Posted : 15/12/2014 3:21 pm
Topic starter
OK, I think I have the knack for identifying meteors
Yep, this time you've got it!
Lovely image, well done.
Posted : 15/12/2014 6:19 pm
Nice image and lovely to have the milky way in the shot too!
Altogether I found about 17-18 images with meteors on them but I am not going to attempt what Sumitra has done with overlaying all the meteors (which btw is brilliant)…that’s way too advance for me right now!
Thank you! And as I'm on holidays, and that you have 17-18 images with meteors, I am wondering what you thought if I proposed to do the composite for you? I think it would make such a fabulous picture and will show the radiant (unlike on mine).
I'd be delighted to do it the best I can, sharing some credits if you don't mind, as it would take quite a long time to do! But of course I understand if you want to hold on to your pictures and do it yourself later 🙂
Posted : 15/12/2014 6:23 pm
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