A single Geminid meteor shoots through the Sword of Orion on the peak night of the Geminid meteor shower, December 13/14, 2017. At bottom is Sirius and Canis Major. Gemini itself is at left, while Cancer and the Beehive star cluster are at lower left. Procyon and Canis Minor is at lower centre. This is a stack of 3 exposures: one for the meteor and two for the yellow smoke train it left though it is subtle. The camera was on a Star Adventurer Mini tracker. Exposures were 1-minute each, with the Canon 24mm lens at f/2.5 and filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 6400. Taken from Quailway Cottage near Portal, Arizona.
A composite of the 2017 Geminid meteor shower, from the peak night of December 13, with the radiant in Gemini, at centre, rising in the northeast at the beginning of the night. Meteors are streaking from the radiant point above Castor in Gemini, with meteor streaks longer the farther they were from the radiant point. The Milky Way runs diagonally across the frame, from Auriga, at top, to Canis Minor, at bottom. This is a stack of 40 images, each a 30-second exposure at f/2.5 with the Rokinon 14mm SP lens and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 6400. The images are the 40 frames with meteors out of 357 taken over 3 hours and 16 minutes from 7:54 pm to 11:10 pm MST. The ground is a stack of 8 images, mean combined to smooth noise. The background base-image sky is from one exposure. The camera was on a fixed tripod, not tracking the sky. I rotated and moved each image in relation to a base image and around Polaris at upper left, in order to place each meteor at approximately the correct position in relation to the background stars, to preserve the effect of the meteors streaking from the radiant near Castor at centre of the frame. Taken from Quailway Cottage, near the Arizona Sky Village in southeast Arizona, with a view looking northeast, toward the nearby towns of Lordsburg and Deming, NM adding the sky glows.
A lone random meteor streaks across the winter Milky Way, and through Auriga and Taurus toward Orion, on December 12, 2017. While this was the night before the peak of the annual Geminid meteor shower, this was not a Geminid – it was going the wrong way! This is a stack of 7 exposures, each 1 minute at f/2 with the Canon 24mm lens and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 6400 on the Star Adventurer Mini tracker. One exposure contained the meteor streak; the others contained the fading and dispersing meteor “smoke” train. Taken from the Quailway Cottage near Portal, Arizona.
