Starship Asterisk*

When Gemini Sends Stars to Paranal

Explanation: From a radiant point in the constellation of the Twins, the annual Geminid meteor shower rain down on planet Earth. Tonight, the Geminds reach their peak and could be quite spectacular. The featured blended image, however, captured the shower's impressive peak in the year 2012. The beautiful skyscape collected Gemini's lovely shooting stars in a careful composite of 30 exposures, each 20 seconds long, from the dark of the Chilean Atacama Desert over ESO's Paranal Observatory. In the foreground Paranal's four Very Large Telescopes, four Auxillary Telescopes, and the VLT Survey telescope are all open and observing. The skies above are shared with bright Jupiter (left), Orion, (top left), and the faint light of the Milky Way. Dust swept up from the orbit of active asteroid 3200 Phaethon, Gemini's meteors enter Earth's atmosphere traveling at about 22 kilometers per second.

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A Lady at my bank is named...Gemini....what are the odds????
Could not see them....the weather is dreadful...and more on the way...

Good image.

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Boomer12k wrote:A Lady at my bank is named...Gemini....what are the odds????
Could not see them....the weather is dreadful...
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What are the odds? Well, I googled on Mrs. Gemini. Lots of ladies!! Then, I googled on Ms. Gemini....

Today's ESPOD is Comet Catalina, but it is an image that is much inferior to yesterday's APOD!

Nice pic, thanks!
Description typo note: the shower rains down, not rain.
--Eric

Does an observatory complex like Paranal experience any hindrance from meteor showers? Or perhaps is it only a small chance the a single extra exposure gets discarded?

Case wrote:
Does an observatory complex like Paranal experience any hindrance from meteor showers? Or perhaps is it only a small chance the a single extra exposure gets discarded?

Planes and satellites are probably a bigger problem but a lot less so now with digital recording (e.g., digitally remove that 3 am red eye flight) than with photography.

Case wrote:Does an observatory complex like Paranal experience any hindrance from meteor showers? Or perhaps is it only a small chance the a single extra exposure gets discarded?

Meteors in images are fairly rare. When they occur, they are usually ignored, and occasionally have scientific value in their own right. No hindrance at all.

neufer wrote:

Case wrote: Does an observatory complex like Paranal experience any hindrance from meteor showers? Or perhaps is it only a small chance the a single extra exposure gets discarded?

Planes and satellites are probably a bigger problem but a lot less so now with digital recording (e.g., digitally remove that 3 am red eye flight) than with photography.

It's worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of images have no aesthetic intent, and therefore there's no reason to remove artifacts (and doing so will cause more problems than it will solve). If a plane happens to pass through the part of the frame that matters to the project, the frame is probably ruined, not repaired the way an aesthetic image would be.

heehaw wrote:

Boomer12k wrote:A Lady at my bank is named...Gemini....what are the odds????
Could not see them....the weather is dreadful...
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What are the odds? Well, I googled on Mrs. Gemini. Lots of ladies!! Then, I googled on Ms. Gemini....

This was her FIRST name....

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Typically Geminian, all over the place.