Stormy Weather

2012 was supposed to be a great year for meteor showers.

It was a bust.

This year, the moon's phase was new or at least before first quarter on the nights of all the major meteor showers' peaks. This was going to give me excellent opportunities for time-lapse movies of meteors.

Each one was rained out.

The peak of the Geminid meteor shower was the morning of December 14. Jerry and I scheduled a vacation day for the 14^th so we could stay out all night in a dark location and record the shower then catch up on sleep later in the day.

Unfortunately, the wrong kind of shower happened. It rained.

We went out around 10:00 the night of the 13^th to see if the sky was clearing up but there wasn't a star to be seen. We went home. Around 12:30 I looked out the window and saw bright stars in a hole in the clouds. We bundled up and went out to our driveway and saw that the clouds were breaking up.

Instead of getting back in the car and trying to find a dark spot, we just set up our reclining camp chairs in the driveway. I set up the camera. Before the camera got ready to record the meteors that might outshine the cloudy, light-polluted sky, we got to see some really impressive shooting stars.

After the camera got snapping, there weren't a lot that were bright enough to see. And the clouds came back. But they cleared up again for a little while. Then they came back and started dropping rain on us. We had had enough after only an hour and a half.

I took 15-second exposures every 16 seconds. I ended up with 308 pictures. I found four whole meteors in those pictures. It wasn't an impressive meteor shower in Escondido.

Here's a little movie of that hour and a half. You get to see two views of the sky. The first part simply plays the images as they were exposed (they are somewhat overexposed) at a rate of 15 frames per second. The few meteors appear for only a single frame so you probably won't see any in the first part.

For the second segment, I darkened the sky to try to compensate for the exposure. The clouds got really wild with that treatment. I also stacked the images with each new image at full brightness and the previous images progressively fading. That made the stars have short trails and the meteors appeared then quickly faded. I added pointers to the meteors so you have a small chance of seeing them. I also added a timestamp to each frame so you can see time fly. The timestamps are on daylight saving time. I forgot to change the camera's clock when time fell back.

I see the Leonids and Geminids won't have the moon ruining the view next year. Let's hope the weather cooperates. I want to get a movie with meteors!

Your best chance to see the meteors in this video will be to watch in HD.