Geminid meteor shower

Jeez Mike, I did'nt realize the sheer amount of shoting stars over that time perion, I think that's a great capture of how to show prople how meteor showers really work

Keith.

Thanks Keith
Yep, there’s a lot going on up there all right. If one was using a fisheye type lens with a sensitive real-time video camera you could monitor the sky completely however there is a trade off in the sense that such a system could not pick up fainter meteors entering our atmosphere, useful for meteors up to +2 - +3 magnitude. I use 8mm lens as a good general all rounder and it will capture meteor events to about +6 Mag in real-time but some people are using 12mm, 25mm etc which will pick up fainter meteors than my system but obviously will have a narrower field of view and hence may not video capture as many meteors but it all balances out if people are working together in monitoring target areas of the sky over a range of lenses. I will definitely have the cameras running over the weekend; I am still waiting to capture a very bright fireball!

Clear skies
Mike

Excellent stuff Mike! Very interesting! I hope to install something similar in due course - got my hands full right now though.

At the moment, one of the things I am doing is trying to get the radio observatory up and running. I'm 99% there *I think*. Aerial is up, computer controlled radio receiver is connected up to my observatory PC. Software is installed on PC and now I am fine-tuning the frequency to try and capture the radio reflections from the meteors - not as easy as it sounds unfortunately. I'll keep you posted on how I get on.

Michael.

That’s excellent and really interesting Michael, we could definitely do work together in the future correlating the data, please keep us updated on your project. Skies look clear so far, lets hope it’s a good night for meteors!

Clear skies
Mike

Holy smokes, thats alot of meteors, and its only gonna get better tonight and tomorrow night!

Just back in from a chilly night meteor observing from 2:30 - 6:30.
My definite count was 157 in all.
There was a distinct bias to the 'Mars' side of Gemini in the first
half hour or so, actually there was a bit of a 'flurry' that side
next to Mars.
I saw 2 very bright fireballs on the horizon.
My count is conservative as I saw a
lot of flashes, more than likely head on's.

My limiting time for photographc work like this here
was just 10 seconds but I think I caught a few all then same.

I'll post up in due course.

Roll on tonight!