First Time Photographing The Geminids

In all my years of stargazing I’ve never actually seen a meteor shower. I’ve spent enough time that I’ve seen an occasional shooting star, but never a truly impressive meteor shower. New Jersey light pollution certainly doesn’t help.

Tonight I set up the all-sky lens on my ZWO ASI290MC camera and let it take 2 second exposures for a few hours. Most frames are just airplanes, but a couple caught meteors! I hand picked through them all and isolated the streak in the photo. I then took them all and composited them onto a single frame background to make the image nicer.

The sky darkness isn’t great, and my neighbors shed light makes some lens flair artifacts, but what can you do. I was surprised that I got such a small number of meteors over such a long span of time, but the ones I did catch were extremely bright, they appear to brighter than Jupiter!

After picking out all the lens flare artifacts the full time lapse is pretty fascinating. From the number of airplanes you can tell I live in between New York City and Philadelphia!

I’ll have to definitely try again for the next meteor shower!