Good evening folks! Tonight is rather exciting. I'm headed up out of town into
a nice dark sky so that I can photograph-- what might be a rare meteor shower. Or
maybe a meteor storm. Doubt it. We've all been fooled before. Monoceros the Unicorn [conestellation]
where the meteor shower actually radiates from. That's where it's radiant is.
Right now I'm just gonna get about 45 minutes out of town--Getting well
out of light pollution and find a nice place to park set up my camera gear
and in about... two hours the meteor shower should get underway. Well the plan is I'm
going to have this one recording video. This is my 6D mk II and I've got an F1.4 20mm
Lens on here so it's a big old light bucket. This one should be able
to catch most meteors--not all of them-- and it's going to be a little grainy but
it will at least be video. I've got my old t1i with an 85mm on it. FInally I've
got my t3i with my 24 to 70 millimeter zoom lens which I'm going to have wide open.
This one's an f2.8 and this one will be taking time lapses--long exposure time
lapses so it should catch hopefully a few meteors that way too. And it's kind
of in-between them...with the crop sensor...it's kind of in-between the two other
cameras. So between the three I'll have three different ways of capturing
whatever meteors I do see. It's really great I stepped out of the truck just to
set up the tripod and a Taurid meteor--so maybe I should stop knocking those--but I
step out of the truck and immediately there was a bright fireball Taurid meteor. Yeah
so maybe that's a good sign? You see the Taurids last through most of
November and you rarely see them. But the ones you do see end up being
really pretty and this one definitely was. And I guess you guys are kind of
interested in meteor showers--this is probably my most popular video I've done
in a yea. This is the meteor storm prediction video that I did
last week. So let's see what I can offer for you guys. Here is is!
My lonely capture of a unicorn meteor. Which I guess the shower is
living up to its namesake! I've labeled these constellations for reference
because I'm going to show you how this is an Alpha Monocerotid and not
something else. I also captured the same meteor on a long exposure of Orion...
though it was a bit out of frame. If we trace back the meteor from its source
using the reference stars of Aldebran and Betelgeuse, it squarely points to
that Alpha Monocerotid radiant location, right where we expected to see it. This
would be one of just two Alpha Monocerotids I'd actually see tonight.
So what happened? Europe was better placed timing-wise than North America, so the
highest counts would come from there. That certainly came true, a night sky
camera set up by the global meteor network was able to capture about 90
Alpha Monocerotids. It's from La Palma in the Canary Islands off the coast of
northern Africa right around 450 UTC. Just as expected a sudden outburst
appears and quickly fades the end result though were much smaller meteor numbers
than predicted. Perhaps a quarter of the predictions and a far cry from the storm
levels that could have been reached. Ee likely missed the center of the dust
trail by just a tad bit more than predicted as I mentioned in the previous
video the margins were razor thin. All right so our window of opportunity came
and went to see the Alpha Monocerotids. And it was a dud! At least from here. I'm
in eastern South Dakota right on the Minnesota border
and at least as far as here is concerned I think I saw maybe two candidate
meteors for the Alpha Monocerotids. I think I did
actually see three or four Taurid meteors which is ironically kind of high
Well what can you do. It is what it is. I did see all together probably a dozen
meteors. All mostly all background rate meteors which just kind of goes to
illustrate my point further that if you want to see meteors really bad
just look up wait a few minutes--you'll see one. You don't have to wait for a
storm or HYPE. And I appreciate all the new subscribers that have gotten this
week thanks to that video that I posted earlier that everybody seemed to find
interesting and engaging I guess that's that time to tear things down. Until the
next time. See you out there!