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Look for the Geminid Meteor Shower  Dec 13 & 14

One of the most active meteor showers of the year, the Geminid meteor shower has a broad peak, so you can catch the peak action in the early morning hours of December 13 and 14, and the nights on either side of those dates may have a decent quantity of meteors as well.  I'm going to catch it from the warmest, driest, darkest, clearest place I can find: Death Valley!

Create a Timelapse Video of the Geminid Meteor Shower
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2011/08/create-timelapse-video-of-meteor-shower.html

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241 thoughts on “Look for the Geminid Meteor Shower  Dec 13 & 14”

  129. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    Thanks everyone!  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.

  163. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    In Death Valley this week the highs are 73 to 80 degrees and the overnight lows are 49 to 54 degrees +Clarissa Vincent. It  depends where you are though… it may get down in the low 40s or lower at higher elevations in the Panamint Range, and there's probably snow on Telegraph Peak over 9000 feet or so.

  182. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    Yes +Clarissa Vincent, bundle up warmly to watch for a while, but at some point in the evening I just leave the camera running with an intervalometer timer triggering new shots constantly, and go to sleep while the camera does all the work.  With no moon out this year to interfere with the show, I just throw my sleeping bag out under the stars to enjoy the show until I drift off to sleep.  

    I keep hoping that someday a red-hot rock may land nearby as I watch.  I probably have much better chances at winning a lottery of course, but I did hear the sonic boom or explosion when a minivan-sized meteor disintegrated over California last April.  My kids and I were up the night before shooting the minor Lyrid meteor shower so we almost caught it with our cameras, but the big one went overhead around 8am the next morning as I was having coffee.

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