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Space Science

Geminid Meteor Shower 88

Posted by timothy from the bribe-the-rooster dept.
Inferno Intelligence writes: "spaceweather.com is reporting that there will be another meteor shower real soon. They are reporting that '[t]he shower [will] peak on Dec. 13th and 14th!' 'What are the Geminid meteors? Scientists aren't sure. Perhaps chips off an exotic asteroid or dust from an extinct comet.' After last months Leonid Shower, I won't miss this one!" Since I slept through the Leonids, I hope I don't miss this one, too.
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Geminid Meteor Shower More

Geminid Meteor Shower

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  • Everytime there is a meteor shower it is overcast. I never get to see it.
    • There was rain and the notorious marine layer (low cloud cover which slips in off the Monterey Bay) around where I live. I took a trip to the high desert and north of Mohave, CA, I camped in the back of my pickup (due to a late start for Death Valley) It was clear and cool, and with the camper window open I could watch a good slice of the sky while lying in bed (sub-zero sleeping bag)

      You have fair warning this is coming, take a trip, but bring your alarm clock so you don't sleep through it once you get to a good viewing place.

    • Point your antenna towards the meteors and make some meteor scatter contacts. :)

      I'm not joking - it's a common propagation mode for hardcore VHFers. I don't know if it was successful, but a bunch of hams were hoping to use the Leonids to break the terrestrial distance record on 10 GHz.
    • With the last shower I was hoping for a good show for my birthday. All I got were clouds as well.
    • My wife and I were up at 3:00 AM to see the Leonids, but it was cloudy - no luck. I suggested we stay up, perhaps one would penetrate the cloud cover; but my wife, bless her, pointed out that if a meteor was big enough to penetrate the cloud cover, we didn't want to be anywhere near it.

  • Nice (Score:1, Redundant)

    by matth ( 22742 )
    A friend of mine got some VERY nice pictures of the leonids. I'll see if I can get them posted on a webserver some place. I love meteor showers, and in the winter the air is so still it's easy to see.
  • I'm originally from a fairly small city. Now I'm living in downtown Toronto. Meteor showers aren't what they used to be.

    Why can't this one be a week later? I'll be home for xmas then!

    Booo-urns!
    • I'm in downtown Toronto as well... And despite the overcast skies, fog and light pollution, I still managed to see quite a few meteorites during the Leonid shower! Fortunately the skies cleared up a bit, right around 5am.

      Cheers,

  • Too bad I have term exams....
    I missed the leonids coz it was damn hazy, foggy in waterloo, ON
    on the other hand..what time is it supposed to happen?

  • Not sure what the fuss is... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Goldenhawk ( 242867 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @11:28PM (#2677513) Homepage
    ... as this year is not expected to be any more spectacular for the Geminids than any other year, and compared to last month this will be positively underwhelming.

    Seems to me that the only real draw is that we just had a very exciting shower so everyone is more aware of the meteor phenom. But as SpaceWeather points out, the expected maximum is only going to be around "100 or more" per hour.

    In short, don't get your knickers in a knot. But if the Leonids woke you up to meteor showers, this will be a good intro to what you'll see in a typical shower.

  • NASA website posts Geminid meteor info (Score:5, Informative)

    by swimfastom ( 216375 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @11:29PM (#2677515) Homepage
    NASA [nasa.gov] has a great article about Geminid meteors [nasa.gov]. The number of meteors has increased greatly since first they first appeared in the mid-1800's. NASA also provides a video [nasa.gov] taken from a man in CA, December 13, 1998.

  • I took my daughter to see the loenids and she was really impressed. It seems to me that the Geminids will not be as spectacular so I may skip it. I was really happy that it got her thinking (she's 6, in 1st grade) about earth moving thru space and got her more interested in the planets and meteors. We live relatively close to NYC and we went to the Natural History Museum a few months ago. They have a piece of a meteor on display, which I loved, but she was unimpressed. I think we'll go again and see if her reaction is different this time.
  • the leonoid shower would have been nice to see but in metro detroit it was overcast, not to mention we have a tone of light polution.

  • Don't worry if you miss this one. (Score:5, Informative)

    by fireboy1919 ( 257783 ) <rustyp AT freeshell DOT org> on Saturday December 08, 2001 @11:45PM (#2677558) Homepage Journal
    The Ursids are next.

    They max out on December 22-23.

    Is there something particularly interesting about something that happens pretty much every year? Why didn't Slashdot report them last year? And why only these last two?

    Here's the schedule [amsmeteors.org], by the way.
  • If the last meteor shower was that visible, mind you, I saw only 1 meteor every 5 minutes, will this single meteor be just as bright? Being in NY and all, we have too much light, but in secluded areas, there is SOME visibility. Like in a baseball field when the lights are dead.
    • Disclaimer: INABICTAAC (I'm no astronomer, but I'm currently taking an astronomy course).. I'm thinking if you were able to see SOME meteors during the leonids, you'll be able to see SOME this time, but obviously a lot less since there won't be as many. Unless the debris which causes the geminids is much smaller, the magnitutes of the individual meteors should be similar to the leonids.

      Shayne

  • Oh no! Why not in the summer? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NickV ( 30252 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @11:48PM (#2677563)
    We had a great view of the leonids here inIthaca (and people made fun of me for going to school in the middle of nowhere... HA!.. ok, maybe not)

    But, where are the summer meteor showers? The last one had me standing out in the middle of a field at 5am, something I was uncomfortable enough doing because I was waiting for some cow to mug me (city mentality, I know), but it was also freezing. Now in December? I'll probably cease to exist if I'm out that late in the December in Ithaca. I better not tell my roommates or they'll drag me out again.

    Anyone noticed if there are any summer showers?

    • Yes, the Perseids (Score:2, Informative)

      by xX_sticky_Xx ( 526967 )
      The annual Persied shower is one of the best showers of the year and the best summer shower. The peak is around Aug 12-13 with upwards to 80 or so meteors visible per hour from a dark sky site.

      A good source of info for coming astronomical events is Sky and Telescope magazine. You can find online info from S&T here [skypub.com].
    • Come on! When it's cold outside the sky is clearer. Besides, the cow only wanted your wallet.
    • These are the summer meteor showers. You're just on the wrong side of the planet =).

      skribe

    • Someone else pointed out that the skies are clearer, but failed to mention why. It's because the air is colder and cannot hold as much water vapor, humidity, as in the summer. Less water vapor means less hazy skies. The water vapor can reflect the light from cities nearby and greatly reduce visibility. Only the really bright stars and planets are visible. This is also why deserts are good for star gazing. Other factors can be polution and elivation. That's why they put observatories on top of mountains. There is less atmosphere above them to interfere with their observations.

      The 3 main meteorite showers I observe are the Leonids, Geminids, and the Percids. So, yeah it's best for it to be really cold and clear. Just make sure you bring enough blankets and some hot beverages.

  • nasa's new missions (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If your average idiot american (both joe-six-pack and Congress/presidents) have their way, it'll only be a few more years before watching meteor showers from the ground is the only form of "exploration" they are budgeted for.

  • Photographing Meteors (Score:3, Interesting)

    by IgnorantKnucklehead ( 324494 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @12:01AM (#2677590) Homepage Journal
    After the recent Leonid meteor showers my interest in astronomy became rekindled and I took the old telescope out of the closet and started pointing it at various things in the sky. Then, I wanted to take some pictures of what I saw so I took apart by webcam and attached it to the telescope in place of the eyepiece. Voila! It worked and I got some great pictures of the moon and some rather blurry shots of Jupiter and a few of it's moons.

    Recently I've seen a few pages like this one [astropix.com]. That describe how to take pictures of meteor showers with a 35mm camera (by exposing the film for extended periods of time). Is there any way to extend the exposure time like this with a digital camera? Any objects that are dimmer than a planet or a moon don't seem to show up.

    I'd really like to set something up to get some shots of the Geminids by aiming the scope at a piece of sky and waiting for one to pass in front of it (or set it up to take repeated timed exposures). Is any of this possible with a Creative Video Blaster Webcam? Or should I fall back to the 35mm camera?
    • probably not easily with your average digicam...


      What you could try, though, is taking a number of photos without moving the camera (obviously, you'll need a tripod and ideally a cable release). Then, afterwards, use photoshop or the gimp and add channels from the multiple exposures. This should have the same effect as a single longer exposure. For best results, store images as uncompressed to avoid interference from compression artifacts.


      I haven't tried this but it ought to work. You may have to adjust levels after summing to keep your blacks black. Also, if the photos are not in rapid succession, expect the star trails to turn into multiple distinct stars... Stars move surprisingly rapidly across the sky. It does not take a very long exposure before stars start trailing (visible on exposures shorter than a minute, actual effect depends on your focal length).


      With a webcam, just try storing images for a long time and then averaging over different periods to see what you come up with.


      This may not work at all depending on the low-light behavior of the ccd. You'll probably get nowhere near the performance as you would out of good old film, but it should be fun to try! I'd be interested to know how it works out.

      • Also, if the photos are not in rapid succession, expect the star trails to turn into multiple distinct stars...

        If you mounted the camera so that it rotates around an axis along the north-south pole (equitorial mount) you would overcome this problem. You can buy such a mount for telescopes and could probably rig one up to mount a camera on it.
    • The "new" Kodak DX3900 has an adjustable shutter exposure up to 16 seconds. 16 seconds isn't enough to get shots like you linked to, but it should be enough to get a couple of objects in an intense shower.

      Another reply suggested using photoshop to mesh multiple shots into one, and I tend to agree. I think that's about as good as you can hope for in a shower like this.
    • I wish I could find the actual article, but I have so many Scientific Americans stacked in my room that I might spend several hours looking for it. Basically what it was about was how astronomy is moving back to using film from CCDs. For a couple of reasons. Film has a much lower threshhold for what it will record. In order to register an event, there needs to be enough light to trigger an electrical cascade in the detector. I'm pretty sure a digital camera is going to have a pretty high trigger threshhold compared to the CCDs used by astronomers, since it's designed for everyday use, not taking pictures of stars. Most stars probably don't produce enough light to actually trigger the electronics inside. The other advantage of the film is the resolution. While film is not "infinite" resolution, it has much higher resolution than any electronic device. You might be able to get away with the lower resolution for taking pictures of solid objects, but if you're trying to get pictures of single points, resolution suddenly becomes much more important.
      • the resolution of film is related to its speed. faster films are grainier, that is, they have a lower resolution.

        what is happening is that in order to make the film faster, the particles of silver halide have to be larger. larger particles capture more light and when the chemical reaction occurs, the whole particle darkens (or lightens since this is negative film). hence a faster exposure.

        i'm not sure what professional astronomers use in terms of film, but it's probably some fancy fine grained high speed film that has the resolution and speed they need. probably expensive too. the alternative is to use a slower speed film but with a really long exposure. that means moving the telescope so that it points to the same object even as the earth turns. unfortunately, you wouldn't be able to use this technique to photograph meteors.
    • Meteor photography is usually done with a 35mm camera, a normal or slighly wider then normal lense, some 400 or 800 ISO film, a tripod and a cable release.

      It helps to be under dark skies, as that will allow longer exposures and increase the chance you will catch a meteor. Exposures of 45 seconds to 20 minutes work well, but if you are light polluted, your exposure time will limited because the film will get fogged by the light pollution.

      CCD's aren't normally used for meteor imaging unless you are trying to do some sort of movie. The key here is that the shutter needs to be open for more than a few seconds... most webcams not only don't support this with the software out of the box, but many of them aren't capable of doing it at all.

      CCD's also get "noisy" over time and need to be cooled if used for long exposures. This can be done with a peltier cooler, water/air/ice/whatever. This also greatly increases the senstivity of the CCD. For a collection of good books about this, see this page [willbell.com] and this one about building your own CCD [willbell.com].

      Using a telescope to image meteors costs you more than not. A telescope - in this case, you are using it as a telephoto lense - sees a smaller piece of sky and greatly reduces the chance a meteor will pass in front of the detector/film.


  • Stupid Linking (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by webword ( 82711 )
    Why do people link to home pages? Or news pages that change? It is silly and leads to broken links in just a couple of weeks. You need to link to actual articles. Point to archives. At least those pages stand less of chance of getting broken once the home page changes. Link to static pages, not dynamic ones. Got it?
  • ...make sure you get out of the city to view the show. Meteor showers et al look MUCH better outside of the glare of the city lights. And, bring binoculars with you. You wont regret it!

    I remember seeing some really neat meteor showers as a kid--and the further out of town you can get, the better. It's worth the car ride at 2 in the morning.

  • yay! (Score:1)

    by amed01 ( 540931 )
    .. people are excited to watch a bunch of rocks on fire millions of miles away? stare at the sun! its better! NOTE: any harm caused by this post is hopefully not the fault of the author..
    • Er, the rocks aren't millions of miles away, they provide their display when they hit the Earth's atmosphere.

      But you knew that, right?
  • I hope the weather is better for this shower. It was totally overcast where I live when the Leonids came around. And I even got up at 5am. What an unholy hour.

  • ...staying up late, only to have it cloud up half an hour before the event, I won't bother staying up for any more meteor showers. If I just happen to get lucky, roll over in bed and see the proper time on the clock; then so be it.

  • Like Being a Kid (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Murdock037 ( 469526 ) <tristranthornNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Sunday December 09, 2001 @02:47AM (#2677859)
    I don't like seeing all these "What's the point? It won't be as exciting as the Leonid" posts.

    I went out for the Leonids last month and didn't quite see the cosmic fireworks that I'd prepared to expect, but it was still something that I'm entirely pleased I did.

    I live in downtown Minneapolis, so stargazing is not a common pasttime in these parts. But I went out and sat down on my porch in my bathrobe and boxers at two-thirty in the morning, and just looked up for a half hour or so. I was lucky enough to not be blocked by clouds and I could situate myself so that no street-lights would kill my night vision.

    It was magnificent. I saw five falling stars that night. It reminded me of standing in the middle of a field when I was younger in the northern Wisconsin woods-- at a certain point you stop thinking about the science of astronomy or really anything else, and you're just amazed at the vast dark-blue sky.

    Is there much of anything out there that can give you that feeling, even now, when you're all grown up? I wish there was more.

    If reading a post about a shower once a month on Slashdot will help me know when I can go sit on my porch again and get that feeling, I'm willing to put up with the repetition.
  • I notice alot of "it will be underwhelming" ect, blah blah, not as good as last months...blah blah. Well damn I'm glad for you, I'm freakin' happy you saw the one last month. Guess what? I was in peak zone, and it was bloody well overcast, which means...I saw squat.

    To think on it, last time I actually did see a metor shower would have been somewhere around 1991-92. That's counting the fact it wasn't overcast...raining, or had some other weather system passing over where I live.
  • Are any of these meteor showers visible from approx 32 degrees south? (Not only are most times in one of the many US standards, but there's little or no mention of what people in The Rest of the World can see...
    • In short, not really. Unfortunately for Southern Hemispherites(?) there aren't many good showers, certainly none as good as what we get up here (with the exception of the rare Leonid storms of recent years). There should be some Geminids visible from that latitude (look to the north) but basically the higher the radiant (the point from which the meteors appear to come from) the better the display.

      You can't really complain about not having good meteor showers though. You people way down there have a much richer sky from what I've been told and seen in pictures.
    • Southern Hemispehere no good, but I think May has the Aquarids - I don't know how it's spelt. They're fragments of Halley's Comet I think.
  • Yeah...I missed the Leonid shower as well, so I just have to see this one. heh...day befor finals start. I'll be up all night anyway, so I'll kick myself if I miss it. Then again, the weather has started to get wintery and such...
  • The Leonids were fantastic up here. A couple hundred people from Queen's came out (most of us high as a kite ;D) and sat along the lake. It was a amazingly clear night.

    True, it _was_ Kingston weather in late November, but hell, other than a few extremities going numb, it was all good.

    Geminids and then Ursids, eh? Wish I could remember my constellations so I knew where to look.
  • I'm actually quite glad that /. is posting meteor showers. I generally keep track of the larger ones (Perseids, Leonids) but it is nice to be notified of some of the smaller ones. And a new moon to boot! I think I'll do for this shower what I planned to do for the Leonids which is go camping somewhere. I ended up in a small town in PA for the Leonids with some friends but it was still a great show. For those of you who had an uninteresting experience with the Leonids due to weather, location, etc., I recommend going somewhere else besides the city. Make it someplace fun and interesting. Rent a cabin, whatever. At least then if the weather isn't the greatest, you may still have a good time. I personally woudl like to see all the meteor events posted on /..

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