Eta Aquarid Meteor Shower Tonight

The Eta Aquarids are a light shower, producing about 10 meteors per hour at their peak, so a camera covering a portion of the sky may be lucky to catch one or two per hour. The shower's peak will be tonight May 06 01h15m GMT/Universal Time, (Sunday, May 5, 2013 at 6:15:00 PM PDT here in the U.S.).  

Here in California the radiant point for this shower rises around 2:40 am, to the east, in the constellation Aquarius.  The crescent moon will follow and wash out the sky a bit at 4 am, the sky starts lightening with astronomical twilight at 4:12 am, then sunrise comes 5:53 am.  

With only an hour and change of dark sky viewing after the radiant point rises, I probably won't go out of my way to pursue this one.  

This photo is from the Perseid meteor shower in 2009.  I created a time-lapse video from my Perseid shots that year: http://youtu.be/vroLnrBhbmk

2009 Perseid Meteor over Sierra Nevada

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