Geminid Meteor Shower 2012
The SCO Allsky2 camera/UWO camera10 captured 105 events last night (Dec12/13, 2012)
Of those 33 were false positives (a bit of condensation inside the dome and passing car headlights)… so 105-33=72 meteors, most of which are geminids (by tracing back the path to the geminid radiant). There were several (ie 6 or more) that came up brighter than Jupiter (Mag -2) and a few that were not Geminids (totally different path).
Some of the brilliant ones were (UT Time): (subtract 5 hours for EST)
00:51:58 in the southeast
01:02:57 overhead
02:56:37 in the NNE
03:34:48 overhead
04:55:28 in the south, very bright, captured on allsky1 as well.
06:03:43 overhead
08:12:26 in the Northeast, very bright, captured on allsky1 as well
The others were not captured on Allsky1, mainly because it has a deadzone time of about 9 seconds of not exposing when downloading the previous image, plus the camera is old, is doing 90 second exposures, and is just not that sensitive.
The UWO Allsky camera10 will be replaced this weekend with another with a modified airflow design to try and stop the condensation issue. We are also looking at building some light shields to stop car headlights from directly impacting on the dome.
This system also has GPS time inserted onto the image, so it is very accurate.
The older Allsky1 does not yet but we do have a GPS timing receiver that we just have to figure out how to code to get the time onto the images.
We hope to be out tonight (Thursday Dec 13) as well to do some consumer camera imaging and the old fashion manual eyeball observing for after when the batteries have died!