A composite of the 2017 Geminid meteor shower, from the peak night of December 13, with the radiant in Gemini, at top, high overhead. So meteors appea
A composite of the 2017 Geminid meteor shower, from the peak night of December 13, with the radiant in Gemini, at top, high overhead. So meteors appear to be raining down to the horizon. This was certainly the visual impression. At least one meteor, at left, is not a Geminid, as it does not point back to the radiant. The Milky Way runs diagonally across the frame, from Puppis at lower left, to Auriga at upper right. Orion is at centre. Gemini is at top. This is a stack of 24 images, some with 2 or 3 meteors per frame, each a 30-second exposure at with the Rokinon 14mm SP lens and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 6400. The images are the 24 frames with meteors out of 171 taken over 94 minutes from 2:05 am to 3:39 am MST. The ground is a stack of 8 images, mean combined to smooth noise. The background base-image sky is from one exposure. The camera was on a fixed tripod, not tracking the sky. I rotated and moved each image in relation to a base image in order to place each meteor at approximately the correct position in relation to the background stars, to preserve the effect of the meteors streaking from the radiant near Castor at top of the frame. Taken from Quailway Cottage, near the Arizona Sky Village in southeast Arizona, with a view looking southwest toward the Chiricahua Mountains. From this latitude, Canopus appears low above the southern horizon at left.
Size: 3592px × 5400px
Photo credit: © Alan Dyer / VWPics / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: 2017, air, amazing, arizona, astro, astronomical, astronomy, chiricahuas, cottage, gemini, geminids, meteor, meteors, milky, night, orion, photography, photos, quailway, radiant, shower, skies, sky, space, star, unique, universe
