On the night of May 30/31, 2022, Tracy Davis and I sat outside for several hours, watching and waiting for signs of a possible new meteor shower.
Our plan was simply to look with our eyes, but I brought along a camera to take some pictures. The specs:
For reasons I don't understand, the darktable software would crash after taking just one or two pictures in a long sequence, so I was forced to take individual images by hand.
I tried two exposure times after the sky grew dark. An exposure of 15 seconds yields images as shown below: the view is looking southwest, with the Big Dipper at the top, Arcturus at middle left, Spica at lower left, and Regulus at lower right. (Click to see a full-res version)
An exposure of 30 seconds yields images like this: (Click to see a full-res version)
In this closeup of the Big Dipper from the 30-second image, I've tried to identify the faintest stars which can be detected.
The circled stars are:
label star V (B-V)
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A Cor Caroli = 12 CVn 2.85 -0.06
B 52 UMa 3.00 +1.14
C 63 UMa 3.65 +1.17
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It appears now, after the fact, that an exposure time of 30 seconds would have been a good choice, but I picked 15 seconds as the exposure time for all subsequent images during the night.
Over the course of two or three hours, we noticed about ten or fifteen meteors, with an increase in the rate near the predicted maximum of about 1 AM EDT. As predicted, the meteors were quite different from the ordinary Perseids or Geminids: each event was short, creating a streak only five or ten degrees long; the motion of the object was slow. The brightest events were around first magnitude, and showed a reddish or orange color.
I took about sixty images over this span of several hours, but the only one which caught a meteor was this one (taken at EDT May 30 23:45). Can you find the little streak?
