Geminid Meteor Shower 2023

Geminid meteor shower 2020 composite image, Death Valley National Park

The Geminids are the most active meteor shower of the year, and in recent years it has been in creasing in strength. So December 2023 promises to offer us one of the best meteor showers we’ve experienced. In 2023 the new moon is two nights before the peak, so the moon will not be in the sky on the peak night. With the short days of winter, the dark sky viewing time on the night of December 13/14 will be over 11 hours!

Normally we’re lucky if the moon is out of the way in the prime viewing hours of midnight to dawn, so a long sequence to harvest meteors from may be a 2-battery run of 5-6 hours. In 2023 I’m going to have 4 bateries charged and use a 2-battery grip to do two sets of 5-6 hours each. This year my intention is to have at least one camera left facing the same scene for all 11 hours, so hopefully we’ll have clear skies and I can catch 100+ meteors to bring into one compsite image.

One advantage of shooting long sequences is that not only can you show the brightest images in one composite image, you can also process all the images to produce a time-lapse video. Here are three different time-lapse clips from 2020, assembled together in a 38-second video:

Sky & Telescape Magazine has a featured article by “Astro Bob” King on their Web site with more information on the 2023 Geminids. You can navigate straight to the article here. The main meteor shower composite photo at the top may look familiar!

Lori and I have been pursuing meteor showers for a long time. Click on my link here to see some of my results from 2017, 2014, and 2010.

Addendum: I received an email claiming that the composite photos are a “drawing”, as if they were faked in some way. That’s nonsense. It accruately shows where teh meteors were captured by the camera in the sky, and it shows that multiple meteor showers are active on that night (as well as any random meteors captured). Here are the technical notes that I’ve had publicly posted for years, on how I captured and created that composite photograph:

Approximately 65 meteors captured in 750 25-second images at 16mm focal length, from 11:49pm – 5:12 am on the peak night of the Geminid meteor shower, December 13-14. The background image showing zodiacal light on the left and a bit of the Milky Way on the right is 10 images stacked and aligned, centered before the approaching dawn around 4:48am.

I set a Canon intervalometer to trigger continuous shots on my Canon 5DMarkIV until I turned the camera off or the dual batteries ran out.

I don’t edit my results to move meteor from where they occur because there are three other meteor showers with radiant points active near the Geminids, The Chi Orionids, the Monocerotids, the Sigma Hydrids plus three more near the southern horizon at this time of night, plus random meteors not associated with a known shower. They should not all point to the same radiant point… in my experience shooting the more active showers as often as possible over the past 12 years, if you capture enough meteors over enough time, they almost never do. Images that show sanitized, fanciful interpretations showing dozens of meteors perfectly pointing to a single radiant point look severely faked to me, not unlike “giant moon” shots faked from multiple focal lengths.

Technical notes on this composite photograph. also published for years:

“I programmed the interval timer on my Nikon D850 to capture 435 shots from 11:30 pm – 2:10 am, 3 frames per minute on a 20mm lens.

I slept through most of it, then changed the batteries and set the camera going again in another direction.

I don’t edit my results to move meteor from where they occur because there are three other meteor showers with radiant points active near the Geminids, The Chi Orionids, the Monocerotids, the Sigma Hydrids plus three more near the southern horizon at this time of night, plus three more near the southern horizon at this time of night, plus random meteors not associated with a known shower. They should NOT all point to the same radiant point! Such sanitized, fanciful interpretations look severely faked to me, analogous to “giant moon” shots faked from multiple focal lengths.”

Pretty basic photography techniques, accurately capturing where the camera saw the meteors in its field of view.