sophie's fair

Asterix the Gaul (c) René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo

here's a good chance for people away from city lights to make a long wish list and feast their eyes tonight as the geminid meteors illuminate the skies with dazzling brilliance.

The Geminid meteors are usually the most satisfying of all the annual showers, even surpassing the famous Perseids of August. Studies of past displays show that this shower has a reputation for being rich both in slow, bright, graceful meteors and fireballs as well as faint meteors, with relatively fewer objects of medium brightness.
Geminids typically encounter Earth at 22 miles per second (35 kilometers per second), roughly half the speed of a Leonid meteor. Many Geminids are yellowish in hue. Some even appear to form jagged or divided paths.
The Earth moves quickly through this meteor stream. Rates increase steadily for two or three days before maximum. So over the weekend, viewers between midnight and dawn might see a shooting star every few minutes. The number of meteors drops off sharply after the peak. Renegade forerunners and late stragglers might be seen for a week or more before and after maximum.
The Geminids begin to appear noticeably more numerous in the hours after 10 p.m. local time Monday, because the shower's radiant is already fairly high in the eastern sky by then. The best views, however, come around 2 a.m. Tuesday, when their radiant point will be passing very nearly overhead. The higher a shower's radiant, the more meteors it produces all over the sky.
From Jimmy Westlake:
"Back in 1985, I was teaching and directing the Rollins Planetarium at Young Harris College at the base of Georgia's highest mountain peak, Brasstown Bald (Yes, Georgia has mountains!).
"The 4784-foot mountain often served as my private observation spot at night, as it did on the night of December 13-14, 1985 during the Geminid meteor shower. I aimed my tripod-mounted Nikon FE-2 camera toward the celestial pole and stopped down the lens to f5.6 for a 60-minute exposure. Several meteors flashed by during the hour, but none were bright enough to record at f5.6.Two airplanes, headed for parts unknown, left their silent trails across the film. The silhouette of the tower housing the Information Visitors Center and observation deck is visible atop the peak, 200 feet above me.
"After the hour-long exposure, I placed my gloved hand over the 50 mm lens, carefully opened the aperture ring to f1.8, and waited for 5 minutes. I then removed my hand from in front of the lens for a final 30 second exposure to punctuate each star trail with a bright dot. As fate would have it, during that 30-second interval, the brightest Geminid fireball of the night shot right across the center of the image! My main concern was not bumping the tripod as I jumped up and down in excitement!
"The result, as you can see, is a striking portrait of a Geminid meteor."

Take the advice of a man whose teeth have chattered on many a winter's night - wrap up much more warmly than you think is necessary.
-- Henry Neely, lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium

give yourselves 15 mins to adjust your eyes to the darkness, dont forget the hot cocoa/coffee to take the edge off the frost, a comfortable chair to sit on, and friends to watch with you and keep you awake. have fun stargazing!