Showered

"If you don't leave a comment - I don't know you were even here."

Frank - my friend and "student" and I traveled to the top of Mt. Lemmon on Saturday (several times as I forgot some crucial pieces of hardware) with a mission to photograph the Lyrid Meteor Shower. The shower is typically not a very "rich" shower - producing on average 15- 20 meteors per hour. Hardly worth staying up for. But the conditions here in Tucson were ideal - clear skies, warm (relatively for a site that is at 9,500 ft), and no moon.

I was suffering from severe CRS (Can't Remember S&*t) and forgot some mounting plates to mount the cameras to the tripod and GEM mount. Frank had to drive me back down the mountain where we met my wife and daughter who kindly agreed to meet us half way with the hardware needed. Feeling particularly exhausted due the chemo I was on - Frank helped me setup and calibrate the mount and cameras. I started the 5 hours worth of exposures at 9:30pm and went to bed - waking at 5:00am to shutdown the cameras and put them away out of the impending sunlight. My thanks goes out to Frank - a good friend and good sport.

Below are images from the two cameras of the shower a combination of the frames that showed meteors over the cameras 6 hours of integration - 30 second exposures at ISO 6400 and wide open F/2.8 and F3.5 lenses. Very few meteors were caught as apparently the shower had peaked at 5 pm local time - while it was still light out in Tucson.

The Sky is Falling II . . .

This morning the sky fell again - this time pieces of comet Kiess (C/1911 N1) from it's last passage into the solar system in ~ 83 AD. The comet is a long period interloper from the Oort cloud and as such may be delivering debris that is pristine from the birth of the solar system. The peak was due at around 4:36am local time but visual observation suggest that this peak occurred earlier then expected (~4:25 am).

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.