The Geminid meteor shower is one of the biggest of the year and meteors from this shower should appear from the 4th to the 20th of December. The peak is predicted to be at 19:30 UTC on Thursday 14th of December 2023.
The radiant of the shower is above the horizon from about 18:00 to 10:00 local time and will be highest above the horizon around 02:00 local time. As the sky will be dark with a new moon, it should be a good visual spectacle as well in clear skies.
From a radio point of view, there should be plenty of meteor pings and bursts with an hourly rate of 150 expected.
On bands like 40 MHz, 50 MHz & 70 MHz, signals that are 500-1000kms distant should give good signals. The higher bands like 144 MHz will need longer paths.
One of the best bands for meteor scatter is 50 MHz. See if there is a beacon about 500kms from your location and have a listen on SSB or CW. It can be useful to have a waterfall display like that used for FT8 so that you can visually see weak signals.
The best time for meteor scatter is usually around 6am local time. If you were to try around 6am on the 14th & 15th of December then you should see and hear plenty of meteor bursts and pings.
2 comments:
Little correction: times for radiant rise/set and peak are always local time, not UTC. Best at 2:00AM local standard time, no matter where you are on the globe.
Thanks for the update, post now corrected for 'local time'. For me, local time is UTC in the winter so it's easy to slip into the mistake for using UTC fir all times.
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