[Chaos-l] Spectacular Orionid

[matted]

I've been messing around with DSLR photography the past 6 months or so, so
happy to explain the settings I use and some of the special equipment I
use.  I don't have any reasonable way to track the sky with my current
equipment, so I pretty much capture star trail images and hope for the
best.  ATT actually had an OK article on Star Trails in the edition that
just came out.

I did coincidentally set up last night to acquire images pointing east over
about 7 hours - hoping to catch a bright Orionid.  Acquiring 500+ images
each one minute long (800 iso, f/4) yielded *one* decent Orionid (and
several planes in other shots).   I attached the picture.  Note the trail
is dimmer than any of the main Pleides stars so this would be a relatively
unexciting shooting star.  Nothing compared to some of the shooting stars I
witnessed at SRSP!

-Matt



On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 10:37 AM, Tony Garcia <randomcoffee at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> This was amazing Jon !!  I've re-read this several times imagining the
> detail.
>
> I got up early to catch the shower peak before dawn, around 5 am, but only
> saw a few faint ones.  At the Jordan Lake session Saturday night a few
> people were laying down on the grass near me and saw 2-3 meteors.
>
> I tried a few long exposures with my camera from 5am to dawn but didn't
> grab anything, does anyone have any advice on this front?  I simply did a
> series of 30 second exposures pointing at Orion and I was thinking I
> probably need to use more specific settings and technique.
>
> -ctg
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 5:37 AM, Jon Stewart-Taylor <joncst at earthlink.net>wrote:
>
>> Hi all.  At just after 3:30 am EDT tonight (10/21) i saw a spectacular
>> Orionid meteor. It appeared in the constellation Orion, so it was close to
>> the radient.  This means it was fairly short,, maybe 5 or 8 degrees long.
>>  It was very bright, though, brighter than Jupiter, and both left a trail
>> and threw off sparks.  After the meteor itself was gone, there was a bright
>> afterglow left on the sky, perhaps as much as 3 degrees long, glowing at
>> maybe mag 2.5.  Over the next 10 minutes, the glow elongated and distorted
>> until it was vaguely "C"-shaped, and covered an area about 5 degrees in
>> diameter.  During this period it drifted from its original position just
>> east of Orion's shield to the WNW.  It finally faded to invisibility about
>> 1 degree from the Hyades.
>>
>> Best meteor i've seen since the '99 Leonids!
>>
>> J.
>>
>> PS: in 2.5 hours from 2:15 to 4:45, i logged 25 Orionids and 8 sporadics.
>> --
>> Jon Stewart-Taylor:  joncst at earthlink.net
>> Chapel Hill Astronomy: http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos
>> Cape Fear Astronomy: http://www.capefearastro.org/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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-- 
Matt Lochansky
Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/matted> | Twitter<http://twitter.com/matted69>
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