Geminids at minus seven

Geminids: 104 meteors in 2.5 h · limiting mag. 6.0

The Geminids are the reliable ones: slow, bright, often yellowish, and the radiant is up for most of the night because Gemini rises early in December. The catch is that it is December.

The car thermometer said minus seven when I parked. I lasted two and a half hours with two sleeping bags, hand warmers in my boots and the clipboard in a plastic bag to stop the frost getting into the paper.

Count

One hundred and four Geminids, plus eleven sporadics. In the busiest half hour I was writing so constantly that I almost certainly missed some. Several were brighter than magnitude zero, and two split into fragments near the end of their paths.

The camera ran an interval shot all night and caught nineteen of them, which made a pleasing stack once I lined up the stars.