After gushing qualifiers and spewing cautionary modifiers all over everyone’s parade yesterday, it looks like last night’s “Best Meteor Shower Of 2014!” was almost a complete bust, not just for me but for most people.
I was mildly surprised to see that the pictures didn’t 100% suck. You can in the 11:26 PM Tweet that I was expecting a total failure on the photos, but a few actually are usable. (Remember what I said about taking a LOT of pictures and bracketing your exposure times from way way low to way way high?)
This grey-white hazy look is pretty close to what I was seeing with the naked eye, although the picture shows about four times as many stars as I could see without using the binoculars. The Big Dipper is right in the center to center top of the photo, “facing” right. This was an unguided 45 second exposure with the lens set at 18 mm. With that combination there’s very little trailing to be seen.
For contrast, here’s a picture taken March 12, 2013 from a very dark sky location in Arizona. This is an unguided 30-second exposure, also with the lens set at 18mm. Orion can be seen at the upper center, the Orion Nebula in the “sword” clearly visible. (Remember, you can click on the picture to get a full-sized version.) Not only can you see a couple of orders of magnitude more stars in an exposure that’s only 2/3 as long,you also see an almost completely flat black background.
Final count on the night was:
- One really good meteor which almost certainly wasn’t part of the expected shower. It went right through the “dipper” part of the Big Dipper, west to east, where the expected meteors associated with the shower should have been coming from the northern horizon toward the east, west, and zenith.
- Two small meteors that probably were part of the shower.
- Four or five “maybe” meteors, flashes in the right area of the sky, viewed in peripheral vision, gone by the time you look directly at it. There? Not there? Maybe?
- One flaring satellite in the northwest, possibly an Iridium, maybe something else
- One really high, dim, slow satellite, also passing right through the Big Dipper
- Five or six really high jets, probably from Mexico, Latin America, or South America to San Francisco, Seattle, or Canada
- Two dozen 737’s heading into Burbank Runway 8 (we’re right under the normal flight path)
On the good side, it was quiet and peaceful (except for the bunnies or racoons or coyotes or feral cats or skunks or opossums in the bushes near where I was sitting) and the mockingbirds sounded wonderful!
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 