December 13, 2015
Long before your first heartbeat, stars were busy forging the elements you would one day call your own.
When Gemini Sends Stars to Paranal
Birthday · December 13, 2015
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APOD published December 13, 2015. Credit: Stéphane Guisard (Los Cielos de America), TWAN. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
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. Tonight: Join NASA's Geminids Tweet Chat
Image credit: Stéphane Guisard (Los Cielos de America), TWAN