The 2025 Geminids

 

It's unfortunate that one of the best meteor showers of the year has to occur in the cold month of December! Although I live in Arizona, where the winters are mild, meteor showers are tough because you have to be outside to watch them, and while you're out there, you're just standing there looking up, or sitting in a chair or lying on a cot. The inactivity makes you feel colder than if you were doing something. And if you don't have a chair or cot, it's kind of a pain in the neck to look up for long periods.

Nevertheless, my daughter and I stood out there in our back yard for about 5 minutes looking up, and we saw about 10 meteors. For our bright, suburban skies, that's not too shabby. One of the meteors was very bright and drew an "Ohhhhh!" from both of us. After that highlight, we decided it was too cold and too painful on our necks to keep watching, so we went inside. And that 5-minute meteor gazing was a much better experience than, say, watching the Perseids last summer, when we stood comfortably outside, watching for 5 minutes and saw zero meteors!

An alternative to standing outside for hours in the cold, however, is to set up a camera on a tripod and let it take pictures unattended. My Canon EOS 6D DSLR is perfect for such a task. Earlier this year, I purchased the venerable Rokinon 14 mm f2.8 lens, and I had been looking forward to trying it out on the Geminid meteor shower.

The Canon EOS 6D doesn't have a built-in intervalometer, so I purchased one of those from Amazon a few years back. I have to admit that it took me some time to figure out how to work the intervalometer, and since I use it so rarely, I have to spend about as much time relearning how to use it each time! I wish it was easier! But I wrote my own instructions and keep them in the box, so now every time I use the intervalometer, I follow those instructions, and it goes pretty smoothly!

Last night, after watching for five minutes and assuring myself that it would be worth the effort, I put the Rokinon lens on my camera, attached them to my tripod, and took it outside. I set the lens aperture to f2.8, the exposure time to 10 seconds, the ISO to 1600, and spent a few seconds getting the manual lens focused on some bright stars. I aimed the camera up at Orion, attached the intervalometer, hit the Start button, and let it fire away.

We had a lot of clouds, but by midnight, it was mostly clear. Around 1 AM, I walked across the yard to my shed, rolled out my 11-inch SCT and proceeded to search for supernovae among the distant galaxies for a few hours, while my DSLR was shooting meteors.

By 3 AM, after getting some images of Comet 3I/ATLAS with the 11-inch, I went down to put the telescope away for the night. When I came up through the yard to the DSLR on its tripod, I wasn't hearing the shutter clicking. Turns out my camera battery had died after about 1 hour of shooting!

Oh, well. 

I got some sleep and then later in the day, I retrieved the SD card from the camera and reviewed all the images on my PC. The camera had taken 189 pictures before it died. Of those, only five of them actually captured a meteor! The area of sky captured by the 14 mm lens included Gemini, Auriga, Hydra, Cancer, Orion, Monoceros, Canis Minor, Canis Major, Lepus, Eridanus, Fornax, and Taurus (both the Hyades and Pleaides clusters). 

I didn't shoot the eastern, western, or northern sky, so I can't speak for the meteors that may have occurred in those sections of the sky. Oh, if only I were able to afford five DSLR's, five tripods, and five Rokinon lenses, to record north, south, east, west, and zenith! Then I could do justice to meteor showers! 

I think it was probably a mistake, but I left the camera's "Long exposure noise reduction" set to "On." This takes a 10-second dark frame following each 10-second light frame and subtracts the dark from the light frame to reduce thermal noise from the sensor. I was hoping that this would save me a lot of processing time. But in reality, I think it was more harmful by forcing a 10-second delay between each exposure. If I just allowed continual shooting instead of shooting a 10-second dark frame (with shutter closed) in between each exposure, I could have recorded more meteors. I'll try turning that off next year.

Overall, I can't really complain about my photographic results. I was able to see a few meteors with my unaided eyes, and then the camera did what it could out there when it was too cold for me. I'm happy to have even this one decent shot of a meteor!


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