The Geminid meteor shower peaked on December 13th and for the first time in years I got a chance to see it. Wednesday night the 12th of December started clear but rapidly clouded over. Not forecast and unexpected. Jeff and I laid out back at my place and saw a bunch of meteors despite the clouds, including several fireballs.

The next night, the 13th of December I traveled out to and watched from the Flint Hills. For December you couldn’t ask for better weather, about 40F all night with light south winds. It started out crystal clear but thin clouds did move over the area around midnight. The show was still fantastic. Its the best meteor shower I’ve seen in many years,

Photo below is a composition of the night including the approaching clouds.  This is made from many exposures taken through out the night. The constellation Gemini is lightly outlined and over two dozen Geminid meteors are visible (click for bigger version).

I didn’t start counting meteors until 9:00pm but prior to that Phil and Thomas were seeing many meteors.  The count I recorded is below:

Thats  201 Geminids in 3 1/2 hours effective observing time. Going to be hard to top this shower for awhile.

Late Friday night my friend Jeff stopped by the house to observe the night sky. It was a nice clear night,  reasonably warm but annoyingly windy. As we gazed upward from the shelter of my observatory we saw a number of Northern Taurid meteors.

I don’t normally go out of my way to watch minor meteor showers.  Perhaps I should rethink that for I was pleasantly surprised this night. I was not expecting many with my sky conditions and a partially obstructed view. Over the one and a half hours effective observing time I saw 8 Taurids,  including a very bright one that popped.  The Northern Taurid meteor shower was forecast to peak this weekend, it must be having a good year.

One of several Quadrantid meteors I caught on camera.  Meteor was much more impressive to the eyes.

Night started with clouds moving over my place about sunset, I went to bed early. Woke up at 2:45am CDT to clear skies and after getting powered up with coffee  I was observing by 3:30.  Here are my actual notes from the night:

03:20-03:30 3 QUA 1 SPO
03:50-04:05 6 QUA 2 SPO
04:17-04:30 5 QUA
03:20-03:30 3 QUA 1 SPO
04:40-04:50 9 QUA 2 SPO
5.8 lm, 29F
05:03-05:14 1 QUA
05:23-05:34 3 QUA 2 SPO
05:43-05:56 10 QUA 2 SPO
06:05-06:15 5 QUA 2 SPO
06:20-06:27 3 QUA 2 SPO

45 total meteors in 1 hour 40 minutes effective observing time. (there will be an app for this).  Very good show this morning. It helps I was looking either up at the sky to the NE or NW, if one had been watching to the south they’d have missed a bunch of meteors.

Besides having nice clear skies it was only 29°F outside, light wind.  There wasn’t even any dew or frost.  In January!  Amazing.

What a nice night to watch a meteor shower here around Lawrence. Hardly needed a coat with this unseasonably warm temperatures (56°F).  The sky cleared up awhile before the moon rose.  I brought a chair outside.

For awhile I sat out under the stars watching for Geminid meteors. I saw several including one really bright one that streaked overhead.  The showers activity must be pretty high.  Soon the sky started to get a bit lighter as the moon came up, the clouds increased over me.  A little taste of the finest annual meteor shower. Very glad I spent some time outside watching.

Phil frames a colorful end to the day October 21st. We were out in the Flint Hills to watch the Orionid meteor shower which was predicted to peak the next morning.  Clouds are not a great start and it took longer than I expected for the skies to clear.  I didn’t see any Orionid meteors until after 2am local time.  Activity was a bit low, I saw a few dozen Orionids before the sky got brighter from the last crescent moon. Then I crashed until almost noon.

Saturday night was clouded out in the area, which is unfortunate. Days later after reading other observer reports it appears the Orionid meteor shower was more active at a later date/time then would be forecast.

I spent many an hour just laying back and observing the stars at the Okie-Tex star party this year. And its amazing the difference a really dark sky makes for meteor observing. If you check the Clear Sky clock for Kenton Oklahoma you’ll find the light pollution is listed as class 1 on the Bortle scale. Hard to get much darker than this.

One gets lost when they first gaze on a sky this dark,  the number of stars you can see is overwhelming.  You can’t find familiar constellations!  And if you patiently watch for awhile you’ll see a consistent stream of faint meteors. Most of these are sporadic in nature but occasionally you’ll get a member of a meteor shower.

Such was the case when I saw my first Draconid meteor Wednesday night. A bright one it slowly streaked across the NW sky. Not only did it come from the right spot it had the tell tale slow speed. Awesome. Despite the nearly full moon and poor timing I’ll be watching tonight for more Draconids. Suggestions are they could have an abnormal peak ZHR and these kinds of events are a bit unpredictable. Nobody knows what you’ll see but you have to go out and look.

Update: A Draconid outburst did occur just as predicted. Had one been in Europe or Asia it would have been a very nice show, even with the moon out! I also note that the actual peak is close to what Meteor Shower Guide calculated +/-  1 hour.

The latest version of Meteor Shower Guide has been submitted to the App Store. Awaiting approval it should be released by the end of the week. So what’s new?

Calendar Events: on each shower detail page is an Alert button that when tapped inserts an all day event into the default Calendar. This event has two alarms set, one and two days ahead of the meteor shower peak day.

Catalog rollover: at the end of the meteor Catalog list is a new item that increments the meteor shower list to the next year. This is handy and also eliminates the need, as far as I’m concerned,  to save a starting calendar year for the app.

IAU Numbers: the meteor shower data set has been updated to include the International Astronomical Union (IAU) meteor numbers. While reviewing all the data I found two showers had incorrect IMO codes, this was corrected.

These new features combined with a few internal bug fixes brings Meteor Shower Guide development for the iPhone to a stable point. The next big phase is the design and creation of an iPad specific version that takes full advantage the screen size. But before that even gets started its almost time for the Okie-Tex Star Party!

Update 09/14: Apple approved version 1.2, its available in the app store now. Everybody should update their copy.