UKH

Leaving the pub last night (Wednesday, after climbing) I noticed that the sky was very clear, a good night for stargazing, then in the 15 minutes it took me to drive home across rural Derbyshire I saw 3 shooting stars!

A bit of Googling revealed that they were the Geminids, a group I'd never heard of before:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/dec/12/starwatch-here-come-the-gem...

Looks like being another clear night tonight so could be worth having a look.

Pompous prog rock/old farts. Oh, sorry! I'm thinking of Genesis

;D

Eranu! 

Hope you managed to stay on the road

Uvavu. 

Cool. I saw one of these on Wednesday am. Looked pretty strange. Very slow yellow orange shooting star. Not like your average shooting star. Wondered what it was. Thanks for sharing 🙂

We think the Geminids are a different colour (distinctly yellowish) because, unlike most meteor showers, they are fragments of a stray asteroid and not a comet.

All done for this year now, but we did have unusually good seeing. I saw one really excellent one on Wednesday night whilst I was walking the dog.

If it was slow then it won't be a shooting star.

Possibly a re-entry (and burning up) of an old satellite - less rare than we think.

Oh. Yeah. Was defo was slow. Was there for maybe a second.

Ah - yeah, that does sound more like space junk burning up on re-entry. 

or more likely a starlink flare?

A second will be a "good" shooting star, space-junk re-entry is way slower than that, several seconds at least to traverse the sky.

Iridium and Starling flares tend to be rather longer but slower, I think, more like 5 seconds? One second is a long time for a shooting star but a bit short for a flare.

Iridium flares don't apparently move, a spot brightens and fades over a few seconds; I don't think Starlink satellites flare once in final orbit but the same would apply. No flares would be happening more than a couple of hours after sunset as the satellites would be in the Earth's shadow. Geminids are apparently 'slow' meteors - only 20 miles per second - and can be fireballs lasting several seconds.

re starlink flares- lots of observations here: https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/649920-light-show-between-40-30-west.ht...

Yes, but observations from airliners at 30-odd thousand feet. Not so surprising, under the conditions that were described, but unlikely to be seen from the ground in my opinion. Somewhat concerned by the responses from the pilots...

Just as I walked into station for my night shift I saw a yellow fireball wizz across the night sky.

Looked fantastic.

can also be seen from ground.. youtube.com/watch?v=q8u1GHHz2Ko&

Thanks for that. Could never mistake them for meteors though, just UFOs!