I observed the shower from the roof of my house in suburban Tucson AZ. From 3:30 am to 5:00 am I observed 42 meteors. Corrected for things such as my ability only to monitor half the sky, moonlight and light pollution, altitude of the radiant, etc - I estimate the ZHR at ~95. Not bad for a rare event like this. Most of the meteors observed were very bright (> 2.0 mag) and made for a brilliant show.
While I was visually observing the shower I photographed the event from 4:05am to 5:00am using two tripod mounted DSLRs equipped with a 15mm and 8mm fisheye lenses respectively. Exposures were 5 seconds at F/2.8 and ISO 1600 for the 15mm and 7 seconds at F/3.5 and ISO 1600 for the 8mm. Above and below are composites of the eight brightest meteors captured during the hour long photographic effort.
Below are the full composites of the two images above. The 15mm full composite is the sum of 519 separate images and shows 19 individual Aurigid meteors. The 8mm full composite contains 422 separate images and shows 17 individual meteors. Meteor trails were highlighted for easier identification in the full resolution version of the composite.
3 comments:
great work! your fisheyes are always superb! :)
I need a fisheye lens - and a good equatorial mount.... :-) I bet the meteor in the upper right part of Auriga may be the one that I posted on my blog. Just about the right parallax between our sites. BTW, I saw 22 meteors between about 3:41 and 4:58, most of the time spent looking generally at the radiant. My peak was a rate of about 60/hr during the 5 minute interval of 4:08-04:13. Not a bad shower, especially considering the moonlight.
Very nice, Dave. At least you work somewhere. :-)
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