About
Keyboard: Tab or N chooses the next streak. Q and E, or the square brackets, turn it; hold Shift for small turns. Arrow keys slide it. On nights where you find the radiant, Tab to the ring and move it with the arrow keys; you'll hear warmer or colder. H shows you, D describes the sky.
The Leonids are active from 6 to 30 November 2026, and the best night is 17 to 18 November.
The half-lit Moon sets around 11 pm to midnight. After that, look up from somewhere dark: Leo rises in the east and climbs higher towards dawn. Expect perhaps 10 to 15 meteors an hour. It isn't a storm year.
Every November, Earth passes through a trail of dust left by Comet Tempel–Tuttle, which swings round the Sun about every 33 years. The grains, most smaller than a grain of sand, hit the air at about 71 kilometres a second and burn up as shooting stars. Because their paths are parallel, perspective makes them seem to fly out of a single point, the radiant, in the constellation Leo. That's why they are called the Leonids.
On the night of 12 to 13 November 1833, a Leonid storm filled the sky over North America. Estimates vary, but at its height there may have been around 100,000 meteors an hour. Many people thought the stars themselves were falling.
Denison Olmsted, a professor at Yale, collected reports from all over the country. He noticed that every meteor's path led back to the same point in Leo, and that the shower hadn't been seen in Europe. He reasoned that the meteors came from a cloud of particles out in space, not from the air. His paper, published early in 1834, is often called the beginning of meteor science. On the "find the radiant" nights in this game, you do what he did.
When the comet has recently passed, Earth can meet a fresh, dense stream, and a storm can follow. In 1866 there was another. In 1966, observers in the central and western United States saw more than 40 meteors a second for a short while. 2026 is a quieter year: a normal, lovely shower.
The Geminids are active from 4 to 20 December 2026, and the best night is 13 to 14 December.
The Moon is a thin crescent that sets early in the evening, so the sky stays dark all night. Gemini rises in the east soon after dark and is highest around 2 am. From somewhere dark you might see 60 or more an hour; under perfect skies, up to about 120.
The Quadrantids peak on the night of 3 to 4 January 2027, and the peak is short: a few hours, around 3:30 to 6 am UTC on the 4th. Within about four hours of the peak, rates drop by half.
The Moon is only a thin crescent. The radiant is in the north, so look after midnight and before dawn, from somewhere dark. Expect perhaps 25 an hour; under ideal skies, 80 or more.
Every January, Earth passes through a narrow, dense stream of grit. Its meteors seem to fly out of the northern sky between Boötes, the herdsman, and the handle of the Big Dipper. These are the Quadrantids, and for a few hours they can be one of the strongest showers of the year.
The shower is named after Quadrans Muralis, the wall quadrant, a constellation made in 1795 by the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande after an instrument for measuring the positions of stars. When astronomers agreed the official list of 88 constellations in 1922, it was left out. Its stars went to Boötes and its neighbours, but the shower kept the old name.
The Quadrantids were first recorded in January 1825 by Antonio Brucalassi in Italy. In 1839, Adolphe Quetelet and Edward Herrick each suggested that the shower came back every year. In 2003 a small rocky body about 2 kilometres across, 2003 EH1, was found on the same orbit. It may be what's left of a comet that Chinese, Korean and Japanese astronomers saw in 1490, but nobody is sure.
The stream is thin, so Earth crosses it quickly. That's why the peak lasts only hours, not days.
The Lyrids are active in late April, and the best night in 2027 is 22 to 23 April, with the peak around 1 to 2 am UTC on the 23rd.
This year the Moon is nearly full, so it will wash out all but the brightest. Keep the Moon behind a building or a tree, and look in the hours before dawn, when Lyra is high. In a dark, moonless sky the Lyrids give 10 to 20 an hour.
Every April, Earth passes through the dust of Comet Thatcher. The meteors seem to fly out of Lyra, the lyre, near the bright star Vega, though they have nothing to do with Vega itself. These are the Lyrids.
Chinese astronomers wrote about this shower in 687 BC: at midnight, they said, stars fell like rain. That makes the Lyrids the oldest meteor shower anyone has on record.
On 20 April 1803, a fire alarm woke the people of Richmond, Virginia, in the night. Out in the streets, they saw a rich Lyrid display between one and three in the morning. Outbursts like that come every few decades; in 1982 the rate briefly reached about 90 an hour.
An amateur astronomer, A. E. Thatcher, found the comet from New York on 5 April 1861. In 1867, Johann Galle and Edmund Weiss noticed that the Lyrids follow the comet's path. Comet Thatcher takes about 415 years to go round the Sun and should next return around 2276.
Lyrids hit the air at about 49 kilometres a second.
Every December, Earth passes through a stream of grit that seems to fly out of the constellation Gemini, the twins, near its bright star Castor. These are the Geminids, and in a dark sky they are one of the richest showers of the year.
Most meteor showers come from comets: icy bodies that shed dust as the Sun warms them. The Geminids are different. Their parent is 3200 Phaethon, a small rocky body that looks like an asteroid. It was found in 1983 by IRAS, an infrared telescope in space. Phaethon swings closer to the Sun than Mercury does, and the strong heat may crack its surface and loosen the grains that become Geminids. It is named after Phaethon in Greek myth, who drove the Sun's chariot too close to the Earth.
Geminids hit the air at about 35 kilometres a second, half as fast as the Leonids, so they look slower and often last longer. Many are bright, and some look yellowish. The shower was first noticed in the 1860s and has grown stronger since.