Leonids meteor shower: while we sleep...

What happened last night above the observatory ? 

Imagine we take a movie of the whole night sky, +12 hours, with a high sensitive camera and group in one single frame those moments when a meteor is detected by the camera. See the result:

Leonids 2020 trails detected during the night of 16-17 Nov. First light Meteor Cam at the observatory.

In the above synthetic image, created by combining up-to 157 individual images in one single image, we can find more than150 trails. Most of them correspond to meteors and some fireballs (a firewall is not more than a meteor brighter than any of the planets). That is a meteor shower!

The bright arcs corresponds to the individual stars movement as the camera is fixed pointing to North West. Note the Polaris star trail, a small half circle in the top right of the image. Why half circle ?...