Much was made in the news yesterday about a possible new meteor shower in Camelopardalis. Rates of as much as 200-1000 meteors per hour were cited as possible. I was skeptical but I figured I would give it a go. Peak rates were predicted to be from 2am to 4am on the East Coast.
Even better, the skies were looking excellent throughout the day and they held. Transparency turned out to be unusually excellent with stars as dim as 5.7 occasionally being glimpsed with averted vision. Magnitude 5.0 was pretty easy. I setup for imaging and with the excellent Moonless skies decided to go after Abell Galaxy Cluster 2151 in Hercules. This cluster is fairly dim (the brightest galaxy is magnitude 14.3) but very rich with many interesting interacting galaxies and a wide variety of galaxy types.
My imaging gear setup, I started watching for meteors. As it turned out the event was almost a total bust. I spotted my first and only possible member at 12:45 am. It was quite a beauty. Later I spotted a bright yellow sporadic meteor at 2:05 am going the wrong way and it too was quite nice. And that was it. I finally gave up on the shower about 3 in the morning.
Fortunately Hercules came through. This is 4 hours and 45 minutes of 5 minute L subs. Each image in the sequence is
Even better, the skies were looking excellent throughout the day and they held. Transparency turned out to be unusually excellent with stars as dim as 5.7 occasionally being glimpsed with averted vision. Magnitude 5.0 was pretty easy. I setup for imaging and with the excellent Moonless skies decided to go after Abell Galaxy Cluster 2151 in Hercules. This cluster is fairly dim (the brightest galaxy is magnitude 14.3) but very rich with many interesting interacting galaxies and a wide variety of galaxy types.
My imaging gear setup, I started watching for meteors. As it turned out the event was almost a total bust. I spotted my first and only possible member at 12:45 am. It was quite a beauty. Later I spotted a bright yellow sporadic meteor at 2:05 am going the wrong way and it too was quite nice. And that was it. I finally gave up on the shower about 3 in the morning.
Fortunately Hercules came through. This is 4 hours and 45 minutes of 5 minute L subs. Each image in the sequence is