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I captured these images for La Vanguardia Readers’ Photos of the ursida meteor shower seen from Manlleu, in the Osona region.
According to the National Astronomical Observatory, “the Ursid meteor shower is visible, in the northern hemisphere, between December 17 and 26. Its activity rate is modest, between 10 and 50 meteors per hour, with a speed of about 33 kilometers per second”.
The Ursids tend to go unnoticed “because they are located between two meteor showers with a much higher activity rate, that of the Geminids, which reach their maximum a week before the Ursids, and that of the Quadrantids, which reach their maximum.” maximum two weeks after the ursids”.
For observers at our latitudes, 40º north, the ursid radiant is above the horizon throughout the night.
2023 is considered “a bad year for observing the ursids, since their moment of maximum activity will occur four days before the full moon on December 27.”
The maximum activity of the rain was expected precisely for the night of December 22 to 23, when these images were captured from Manlleu.
The crescent moon, very close to the full moon, illuminates the sky for almost the entire night, so visibility conditions are poor. The best time to observe it is in the hours close to dawn when the Moon disappears over the horizon.
One of the images in this report is circumpolar. Circumpolar or startrails (star trails) are a type of photography that uses long exposure times to capture the apparent movement of stars in the night sky due to the Earth’s rotation.
