Viewing the Geminid Meteors

  I took the  easy way out. The sky was partly cloudy at best and the temperature dipped to 26°. Those were two good reasons to go to bed. And I did. But not before setting up my Wyze V3 security camera in the back yard. With night vision, it does a reasonably good job of recording the night sky.

 It's not fancy. But at $36 and with a resolution of 1080p, it's something I can afford and the results satisfy  me.

 Here's the best shot I grabbed from video.

 I had the camera tilted fairly high and aimed roughly SSE. This was certainly the brightest fireball I found on the footage I've reviewed (I haven't finished since I recorded  from 6 PM yesterday (12/13) until 7 AM today  (12/14).

 The Geminids peak after 2 AM usually so I didn't want to miss anything.

 This meteor was more typical ... just a quick streak. I saw many that  were simply quick flashes but clearly meteors. During the hour beginning at 2 AM, I counted 26 meteors. I counted as many as three within a single minute (posted below) but then there were gaps when there was nothing.

 Here's a one minute video beginning at 2:18 AM. You'll see two meteors, both on the right side of the frame. The first is at :03 and the second is at :45.

 And here's the one minute that had three meteors. At 3:13 AM they occurred  at :26 (right side of screen), :32 (center) and :49 (top right). That's quite a pace. For reference, that's Orion on the right.

 Finally, I took a time lapse video of the entire night. I set the camera to grab a frame every 30 seconds. It's purpose? Mostly to judge how the cloud cover was running because there were only two frames grabbed every minute. It's not meant to be a complete picture. The original video is high quality mp4 but it's 130 megabytes and can't be uploaded to Blogger. So I converted it to wmv but lost considerable resolution. But you'll get the idea ...