Geminids

12/09/2023. The Geminids are next up, and they come during a very busy week. I've got a second anti-dew strap on the way, also a USB converter to plug into the powerback so I can run the SWSA and two heaters from it alone. I made a dirt simple oak bar to hold two ball heads so I don't need to disassemble the work-in-progress eclipse kit for a night or two under the winter sky.

By the time the shower arrived, I thought that was a job for the 25mm Zeiss in the backyard rather than multiple cameras out in the neighborhood -- I'm just not inclined to run cameras somewhere that I have to babysit them in 25-degree weather. Not right at this moment, thanks. It worked out well. Voila! (Click it to make it big. Please.):

One night's Geminid catch.
Canon 6D, 25mm Zeiss Distagon, 30s F2.0, ISO 1600

That's December 14-15, the night following the daylight-hidden max. As predicted, the shower remained active in the late evening and into the early morning hours but rates fell sharply after about 3 AM. Over the course of two nights, I exposed just about 2,000 frames and caught 15-20 meteors above our back yard.

The night before was not nearly as clear, but when clouds do not interfere, they just add drama.

Note that these two Geminids were early evening boomers, appearing when the radiant was very low in the northeast. It can be a bit confusing: if you extend their trails, you'll see that they do not meet in Gemini but somewhere way beyond Perseus. They're moving from the bottom of the frame upward. Their trails are actually converging toward an anti-radiant somewhere far beyond the upper left of the photo rather than spreading out from the radiant in Gemini as we think of shower meteors doing. Same tech specs as above. Click it, for godsake. Just click it.

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