About that Geminid Metor shower

You may have seen a bit of a headline buzz about the annual Geminid meteor shower peaking. The peak is going to be tonight (Dec. 13-14), and the Geminid shower is typically considered one of the best of the year - if not the best. The general rule of thumb is that the best viewing is with the moon in its darkest phases, and moonrise is after 1:00 AM Sunday the 14th, local time - my local moonrise is 0134 ET. The phase is in the last quarter so the moon doesn't get much less light than this. All things considered, if your skies aren't cloudy, this could be a very good meteor shower to watch.  

If you're going to be watching visually, the standard advice is to get to the darkest skies you can.  Outside of town, if possible, which means in most the country you'll need to have planned this before the last minute. Of course, considering the time of year and local weather is important, too. Maybe even life threatening if you don't have adequate warm clothing, and maybe even a thermos bottle of hot coffee or tea. You know your conditions and weather better than I can say. 

A composite view of the Geminid meteor shower taken from Arizona. (Image credit: Alan Dyer/VW Pics/UIG via Getty Images)

If you trace the bright streaks, you'll notice the streaks get shorter as you get closer to two brighter stars just right of center: those are Castor and Pollux, the two stars at the "top" of Gemini. The constellation stretches up and to the right in this picture. 

Of course, this is written from the perspective of watching the shower. If sitting up all night or until the early morning doesn't sound like fun, and you're also a ham or the radio aspects are more interesting to you, there's always Meteor Scatter.  I covered a lot about meteor scatter in that article, but not the details of how to set up a computer driven VHF radio to make contacts via meteor scatter. Unfortunately, that's too involved for you to set up everything if you aren't already. If you've already setup a station, and you're using WSJT-X or the Improved version, just click the MSK button, and it will change you to the default frequency and other settings.

I've posted screen captures from DXMaps before, and this one is from about 0220 UTC - less than 15 minutes ago as I type. Every dark blue line on this map was reported as a Meteor Scatter QSO, on or near the agreed frequency to hang out on and try for MS contacts: 50.260 MHz.

A less often talked about aspect of meteor showers is that they're typically usable for radio contacts for several days around the peak. This one, for example, will probably continue to provide contacts for at least another week, it's just the number of the rocks or grains of sand that cause the show and allows the radio contacts drops off. A benefit of radio is that you can make contacts well after sunrise or before sunset. Visually, you can only see the meteors while it's dark.