(meteorobs) Central Texas Geminids report: Saturday/Sunday

[Ed Cannon]

The following report, forwarded with the 
author's permission, was written by Mark Acker, 
a member of the Austin (Texas) Astronomical 
Society.  Note that he's writing about Saturday 
night/Sunday morning, Dec. 12/13, especially 
after local midnight (06:00 UTC).  He was out
intending to do some astro-imaging and so was 
at a location where very likely the limiting 
magnitude was at least +6.0 if not even better.  

I was out of town and out of pocket Saturday 
night, and Sunday night in Austin the sky 
clouded over by 10:00 PM.  So I missed this 
year's Geminids.  Maybe next year.

Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA

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I was out at a friend's ranch near Brady/Menard 
TX (about 50 miles from Eldorado, TX) the night 
of 12/12-13 and saw, without a doubt, the most 
spectacular meteor shower of my life.  I was out 
with the scopes from 9 p.m. until about 6 a.m., 
and in that 9-ish hour period (granted I was 
looking through the scopes a lot of that time), 
I saw 600+ meteors if I saw one.  The popped like 
fireworks all night long.  They would go 4-5 at 
once or 4-5 one after the other ... constantly.  
The curious thing was that they appeared from 
everywhere, literally every direction.  I have 
never been so stunned by anything.  One 
particularly cool one looked like it shot out 
the end of Orion's sword and another time 4 went 
off in sequence like a waterfall-type firework.  
It was just amazing and I quickly run out of 
adjectives to describe the experience.

My friend, who was not outside as much, was 
equally shocked by the sheer volume.  We both 
commented on how many more we would have seen had 
we been lying in hammocks with a larger field of 
view.  

Many of them were small and short-lived, but 
others were really long and bright and a couple 
split into 2.  I am certain that a lot of these 
would have been missed had I been anywhere near 
urban lighting as they were not spectacularly 
bright, though I think just the number of them 
would have been hard to miss.

I shut down about 6 a.m. as the moon and sun 
were both rising and even then the volume 
remained undiminished.

One of the reasons for going out there was to 
try and do a little imaging, but it was a bit 
too windy for that.  Also, because the meteors 
came from everywhere, I don't think I would 
have gotten a single image that wasn't full of 
streaks, though thinking back, it would have 
been nifty to have had some images of it.

The Austin area largely missed out on the 
Perseid and Leonid showers this year, but this 
more than made up for it.  I have seen lots of 
showers before, but I will never forget the 
2009 Geminids, they made that much of an 
impression.  Simply unbelievable!

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