Great Basin School of Photography

I was too busy to travel for the Geminid meteor shower in 2014, so I shot from the front yard of the house I was renting on Topaz Lake.  I was able to use the still images to produce a composite of some of the brighter meteors that fell that night, as well as a time-lapse video from the nights of December 13 and 14, 2014. Topaz Lake is in the Eastern Sierra region on the California-Nevada border.

If your local weather is clear enough and your skies dark enough, in 2017 the Geminids will be visible on the night of December 13/14.  Some of the brightest, longest, earth-grazing  ones will be in the evening hours. While there may be a slightly higher rate of meteors falling after midnight, the earth-grazing ones may have some of their trail hidden by the horizon.

Here’s more information on the Geminid meteor shower from NASA:

“Geminids are pieces of debris from an object called 3200 Phaethon. Long thought to be an asteroid, Phaethon is now classified as an extinct comet. Basically it is the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun. Earth runs into a stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon every year in mid-December, causing meteors to fly from the constellation Gemini. When the Geminids first appeared in the early 19th century, shortly before the U.S. Civil War, the shower was weak and attracted little attention. There was no hint that it would ever become a major display.”

I’ve been actively pursuing meteor shower astrophotography since 2009.  Here’s a composite of images from when I pursued the Geminids in 2010.  I just got around to producing this image in 2017!

It’s necessary to capture a long sequence of images to maximize your odds of catching the brief meteors, but a side benefit is that you can string the sitll frames together and make a time-lapse video with them as well.  Note in this video how much more visible the meteors are once the moon set on this night:

In 2013 I was photographing Comet Lovejoy and I caught a Geminid meteor in the frame with it!  Sometimes in photography you get the shot that you anticipated, and sometimes you get a bonus!

I’ll be leading a photography workshops to shoot the Geminid meteor shower in Death Valley in 2017 and 2018, and I’ll be pursuing the Perseid meteor shower in August 2018 as well, if you might want to capture shots like these!
www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com

I can only be so many places in a year, so I go out of my way to schedule my workshops to coincide not only with peak seasonal conditions (wildflowers, fall colors), but also with peak astronomical conditions such as the full moon rise and set, Milky Way, meteor showers, and so on.  Decent photos of meteor showers are especially rare, since not only does each meteor shower peak on one night per year, the moon interferes with optimal viewing on many years, weather often blocks the sky, and the sky is not truly dark for optimal viewing in most places.  Optimal times of night and directions to shoot in vary among meteor showers as well.  I’m still pursuing a decade-long project to assess the more active showers and how best to see and shoot them.