Annual Geminid Meteor Shower Next Week: Time-lapse Video Preview

As I mentioned in my last post, the annual Geminid meteor shower is coming up next week!  It's one of the most active meteor showers of the year, often delivering more meteors per hour than the better-known Perseid meteor shower.  The peak viewing hours are midnight to dawn the mornings of the 13th and 14th, but the shower has a broad peak so the nights around those dates could be good too.  I'll try to capture enough photos to make another time-lapse video like the one below of course.

When you picture in your mind the earth rotating around the sun, right at sunrise, where you are on the planet, that night to day edge of where the sun's light is striking the earth, is in the middle of the leading side of the earth as it moves through space.  So sunrise is when the part of the earth you're on has the most sky overhead colliding with the most debris, including the comet or asteroid debris which forms these annual meteor showers.  The part of the planet you're on rotates into that leading edge of the moving planet around midnight, so the best viewing viewing hours for meteors tend to be from midnight to dawn.  

If you have a smartphone or tablet, you can get apps like StarWalk which will not only show you where Gemini is, but it will show you the radiant point of the Geminid meteor shower.  Of course is you look straight at the place the meteors are coming from, they're coming straight at you and their tails don't look very long,  Look some distance away and you'll see them ore from the side and their streaks through the sky will look longer.  

For a really active shower like this, there will still be a decent number of meteors in the night hours leading up to dawn as well.  In fact the "radiant point", where the meteors appear to be coming from, rises in the eastern horizon close to sunset, so simply look in a generally easterly direction for the first few hours of the night, then closer to midnight the constellation Gemini will be much higher in the sky and meteors can be seen anywhere in the sky. While not the most active portion of the night in terms of sheer meteor numbers throughout the sky, those first few hours of the night before midnight, when the radiant point is closer to the eastern horizon, can be great for really long, atmosphere-grazing meteors streaking overhead.  Sometimes you see them all the way over on the opposite, western horizon.

The time-lapse video below is best watched directly on +YouTube, where you can select 720p HD quality and watch it full screen: 
http://youtu.be/JPxb-NefyXk?hd=1

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