Geminid Meteor Shower 2017

The Geminid meteor shower is generally acknowledged to be the most active meteor shower of the year with rates of about 120 meteors per hour. It was discovered in the 1800s, and rates seem to be increasing, with some attributing it with up to 180 meteors per hour! While the Geminids aren’t known for producing a lot of bright fireball meteors, the Chi Orionids are, and the radiant point isn’t all that far from the Geminids, so you still have decent odds of catching fireballs, even if they aren’t from the “correct” comet debris stream and apparent radiant point in the sky.

This composite brings the meteors from roughly 3 hours into one image:

3 hours of the Geminid meteor shower further back at 14mm, emphasizing the sky. Canon EOS 6D / 14 mm.

Here’s a time-lapse video made from hundreds of individual images, best viewed full screen at 1080P HD resulution:

The Geminid meteor shower grows in intensity, and does particularly well every three years, so 2014 was great, 2017 was a strong year, and 2020 could well have the highest hourly meteor rate of the century!

Night before peak, Geminid meteor shower 2017. Canon EOS 6D / 14 mm.

Moon rise the night before the peak of the Geminid meteor shower,a few nights ago, along with a quick collection of some of the meteors I caught on that night:

It was 8 degrees F when I arrived just after dark to shoot the meteor shower on this night. I don’t even want to know what temperature it was when i picked up the camera later in the night!

2014 Geminid meteors and a bright fireball, likely a Chi Orionid meteor.

As NASA notes about the Geminids:
“The Geminids are a meteor shower that occurs in December every year. The best night to see the shower is Dec. 13 into the early hours of Dec. 14. The Geminid meteor shower is caused by a stream of debris left by the asteroid, 3200 Phaethon. When the Earth passes through the trails of dust every December left by 3200 Phaethon, we see the Geminid meteor shower as the dust (meteoroids) burn up in Earth’s atmosphere creating meteors. Geminids travel through Earth’s atmosphere at 78,000 mph and burn up far above the surface.”

I shot with two cameras the night after peak as well, but they didn’t capture enough meteors to make processing the images a priority. I’ll get around to it at some point, but it’s pretty clear that the meteor rate on the night after peak is far, far below the rates on the peak night and on the nights leading up to it.

For more of my photos from the Geminid meteor shower, you can see my photos of it since 2010 on my Flickr photostream.

2010 Geminid Meteor Shower. Canon 5D Mark II / EF 16-35 mm lens at 16 mm focal length.

Our 2017 Geminid Meteor shower trip went so well, we went again for dark skies in 2020 and we’ll be doing it again in 2023! Our annual Death Valley Winter Light trip is December 9 -14, when we can enjoy particularly good low angle side-lighting on many of Death Valley’s sand dunes. In the years when we have dark skies, we have several nights to practice as the meteor shower increases in intensity towards its December 13/14 peak.

Comet PANSTARRS from Death Valley National Park, March 2013.

Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy, January 18, 2015. Comet 46P/Wirtanen (2018) should be brighter!