Fairytale Geminids

A photo composite of many exposures. From the photographer: “Around the frozen Seč Lake, where fishes put themself to winter rest, the snowy blanket covered endless forests. People hidden in their warm cottages were just dreaming about their wishes around Advent candles as the miracle night was about to come in only 10 days. Remembering the legendary story of Jesus Christ’s birth, they also questioned themself ‘What could be the Christmas star at that time?’ With the tones of carols in their mind and heart, they probably took a look at the starry sky above and looked for that star again. What a surprise when a shooting star appeared instead of that. Even if Christmas is still days away, this was perhaps the night of wishes too. Dozens of shooting stars shined that calm winter night… Such a feeling I had in 2018 when I luckily observed the moonless Geminid meteor shower during its peak that year. Now, after five years, I made it happen to finish more images from that night.

The Seč island is photogenic in the winter, but the annual Geminid shower is quite tricky to capture. Why? There are many factors to negatively influence the whole view. First of all, the Geminids peak around 14th December, when very usually the inversion weather covers the whole country and only in high mountains you can have clear skies. Seč is below 600 meters above sea level, which is not enough to get above the inversion. Of course, the other aspect of seeing many Geminids is the fact you need moonless skies (or at least no moonlight in the second half of the maximum night). In the end, apart from the weather and the Moon, it is pretty special if the countryside covers new snow just before the Geminids peak to capture this quite fairy-tale view. In 2018, all the needed factors finally came together. The inversion weather covered the whole country as expected but miraculously from 10 pm to the daybreak of the pre-maximum night the sky cleared up just over this region. Only two days before the night, a very heavy snowstorm covered just this region with 30 cm of new snow. And the moon phase was very favorable for Geminids after years. So yes, what I was wishing for the last 12 years, was finally fulfilled. Yaay!

In these views, you can also find green comet 46P/Wirtanen which was about 2 days before its closest approach to Earth. The variety of colors in the sky is caused mostly by different sources of light pollution but also by the airglow.”

Technical details:
Canon 6D IR Baader modified, Saymang 24 mm, f2.2, ISO 10000 (foreground panorama) and Samyang 12 mm, f2.8, ISO 10000 (meteors). Meteors were registered to the foreground image.