Quarantid meteor

I went out on the neighbor's dock around 3 AM during the Quarantid meteor shower. It was very cold for this part of Florida and the ramp going down to the dock was covered in ice, so going up and down the ramp with an expensive camera was dangerous.

This is the only meteor I was able to capture on my camera, even though I set up a timer so that it would repeatedly take 30 second exposures. I used ISO 1600, thinking that a short-lived meteor might not expose properly at a lower setting. I probably could have got away with using ISO 400 or lower. The high ISO setting is the cause of the graininess of this photo. I used a wide angle lens to get as much of the sky as possible. Telescopes and binoculars are useless for seeing meteors, it's best to use a camera or the naked eye.

Meteor showers like this one occur when the Earth passes through clouds of sand-grain-sized particles that are ejected into space as the surface of a comet sublimates when they pass near the Sun. These tiny meteoroids enter the atmosphere at great speed and burn up in the mesosphere from friction and from the heat caused by compressing the gases below them as they fall at many times the speed of sound.