Contains:  Solar system body or event
Geminids 14.12.2019, UN73

Geminids 14.12.2019

Geminids 14.12.2019, UN73

Geminids 14.12.2019

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

On 14.12.2019 the Geminids peaked and the sky cleared up unexpectedly. So I got out some equipment and started shooting the sky in front of my flat which lies in a reddish zone within Vienna, Austria. Together with the bright moon less then ideal conditions but still an opportunity to catch some meteors. The sky was tracked with the Star Adventurer. Every 4 s a 3.2 s shot was taken at ISO 1600, a Canon EOS 700D mod and a Tokina 11 - 16 mm f/2.8 lens (set at 11 mm).

There were a few phases of clouds in between but overall I caught 71 meteors over a timespan of 9 hours with the cam. It was repositioned three times to avoid the FOV running into neighbors flats. Position one and two overlapped about 75%. The overlap is shown in the picture above covering about 7 hours minus phases of clouds.

The subs were predeveloped in Lightroom with the same settings (white balance against the higher red sensitivity to a neutral tone and preflatening, the moon and higher light pollution in the same direction caused a significant gradient), each sub was positioned to the reference one and 38 meteors that were not messed up by thin clouds were stamped through onto the reference sub in Photoshop. The final picture was then further processed in Astro Pixel Processor and Photoshop. To get a grip on the noisy background I tried stacking a background image and integrating the meteors on that one but it looked awkward as the single meteors come from 3.2 s subs and the background was a stacked version of several minutes. It´s better to keep the background with the same settings as the meteor subs (the reference frame contained a single meteor) and keep the noise. To reduce that, aggressive noise reduction was performed which however harmed the fainter meteors.

It´s nice to have a pic showing the typical behaviour of meteors from a shower pointing to the radiant. There are also two less stringent ones in the pic although still pointing in the same direction so most probably also belonging to the shower. The Geminids tend to be yellowish which I can definitely confirm. As some of them are slow ones they are easier to capture and look more impressive when observed. I wasn´t out much of the time, usually just to check the setup but during that time I already saw a few nice ones.

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Geminids 14.12.2019, UN73