Inside the Variance

It started the way most bad ideas do: during finals week, off a news headline. The Geminids were peaking Sunday at midnight, up to 120 meteors an hour, and none of us had the sense to just study.

So we overthought it, which is the only thing we're consistently good at. Light pollution maps. Camera specs, so we'd actually catch something instead of guessing. Threads from other people chasing the same sky. Everything pointed two hours south, to Pinnacles, where the internet promised real darkness.

We got there at midnight and left when the sun came up. The dark out there is a different kind of dark, the kind your eyes take ten full minutes to adjust to before they give you anything back. We had our cameras, our jackets, and eyes not built for this.

“A meteor shower is not a shower. It's Poisson distribution.”

What nobody tells you is that a meteor shower is not a shower. It's a lottery. One would cut across the sky every few minutes, and the camera would catch maybe one in ten. You don't photograph the sky so much as bet against it and occasionally win.

At some point, freezing and staring up, we started arguing about Poisson. Finals brain doesn't switch off. But it fit. The Poisson distribution is the math of rare events scattered across time, which is exactly what we were standing under. "120 an hour" is an average, not a promise, so the sky clumps and stalls precisely the way the equation says it should. You can know the rate and still not know the next minute. We weren't unlucky. We were inside the variance.

“We weren't unlucky. We were inside the variance.”

Then the part we definitely didn't plan for. Midnight crossed into one of our friends' birthdays, so a cake came out in the middle of nowhere, and we shot that too. We drove down for the meteors. We came back with the portraits.