the Orionid Meteor Shower

On December 12, 2017 by cody With 0 Comments - Uncategorized

I set up my camera to try and capture meteors on October 21st, pointed it in the direction of Orion, and took video for 5-20 minutes at a time (mostly going back in the house to avoid the cold).

In total I think I had around an hour and a half of footage. But who wants to star at a screen for an hour, looking for meteors? So instead I stacked the frames, in groups of 500, and looked for indicative streaks—and I spotted 6 of them! Since it was originally 4K, I cropped each of them to 1920×1080, and about 10 seconds, and put them together into this video:

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Before these 6 meteors I had only caught one other, back in the Summer, the night before I was due to return the rented lens. I was trying to spot the Andromeda Galaxy (because what else are you going to do with such a telephoto lens?) and I happened to catch a meteor streaking near the Pleiades star cluster (I think?).

The Geminids are due to peak this Wednesday/Thursday (13th/14th) night (best around 1 am), and I was working on modifying a styrofoam cooler to keep my camera warm, but I’m skeptical it’ll be done in time.

The American Meteor Society has a list of all the meteor showers and where to look for them.

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