The Orionid Meteor Shower

WOO HOO, finally a break in the clouds, mind you it was going to happen between 1 am and 6 am but it would give me lots of time to catch the Orionid Meteor shower and get some pics.

Woke up later then I expected, 3 am, no problem, jumped out of bed, had my coat on already, start driving to my spot, drive back to pick up my camera I forgot, get to my spot again, the show was about to start.



Set up my camera, grabbed an image of the earthshine Moon, above image, changed lens to my fisheye and start taking pics, all this happening within 20 minutes of me waking up, a new record!!!

As I'm leaning against my car in the cold, I had a thought, why not sit in the car out of the cold and take pics, my camera shutter button cable would be just long enough, so I place the tripod right against the passenger side door, enter the car through the drivers side, crawl over the stick shift, my foot hitting the radio button blasting me into the heavens, hitting my head on the ceiling light, I was now officially awake, as I like my music very loud.

Then as I was looking at the cameras LCD screen I noticed everything was out of focus, forgot to focus when I changed lens, no problem, I squeezed through the window and car frame to adjust the focus, almost reached the lens focus ring when I got stuck, something on my person got stuck on something on my car, I tried to back up into the car when I found there was no give, alright I thought to myself, I've been in worse situations, time to work the problem.

Got one hand in the car after much struggle to find out a string on my jacket zipper had hooked the window handle and had to be lifted up and off, seems easy enough, all this wouldn't have happened if only I would have had the window all the way down, but nooooo, I didn't want to let any cold air in, so I finally free myself get back in the car start taking pictures again and find, gee it's out of focus, repeat everything except this time I open the window all the way and focus the camera.


Every October and May the Earth travels through the dust trails left behind by Halley's Comet, as the dust particles smash into our atmosphere at speeds of up to 160,000 mph they excite or light up our atmospheric atoms creating what we call meteors.


In October we call them the Orionids, in May the Eta Aquarids. Even with the Moon out I was able to spot around 20 an hour, an excellent showing for the Orionids this year. On average they were small and fast except for a couple, the meteor in the image above, behind the tree was almost like a fireball, lit up the sky.


The above image is a daytime crescent Moon, I took this one 5 hours after the above earthshine image, if you're interested in winning 50 pairs of Hanna Montana/Miley Cyrus 3D glasses, and who isn't, now is the time to take a pic of the Moon is in it's daytime crescent phase and enter it in the "Daytime Crescent Moon Contest" closing date is November 3rd.

I'll leave you now with an animated image of the Moon crossing paths with a jet.