| 2024: Calendar of Meteor Showers (2023-11-26) ⬅︎ |
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Have you seen shooting stars — those streaks of light in our night sky that appear and disappear in an instant? Perhaps you have seen ones that leave behind smoky trails called trains or the extremely bright ones called fireballs that sometimes break into pieces or explode like fireworks.
Stargazers everywhere love shooting stars but what are they? Although they may look like fast moving versions of the stars in our sky, a better name is meteors since they are tiny pieces of rock and metal left over from the formation of our solar system. When they hit our atmosphere at tremendous speed, they burn up and cause the surrounding air to glow. Cool!
Stargazers often feel lucky and excited to see a meteor, but they are actually very common. Earth is being bombarded by millions of these particles daily and a few may be seen every hour wherever it is dark and clear.
What stargazers get especially excited about are the special times in which the number of meteors seems to explode from a few per hour to dozens and even hundreds. These events are known as meteor showers and there are over one hundred that have been recognized that occur annually. We've listed the major ones below.
Meteor showers, surprisingly, have to do with comets and asteroids. These small, cold, distant objects at times have orbits that bring them into the inner solar system. The Sun’s intense wind and radiation can cause them to eject huge quantities of debris (called meteoroids) into the surrounding space forming a cloud as this photo taken by the Rosetta spacecraft shows:
Meteor showers occur when Earth, in its orbit around the Sun, collides with this debris. For many showers, the parent comet or asteroid has been identified.
We can know when to look for a meteor shower since it occurs around the same time each year. Every shower has a range of dates and a peak time in which the maximum rate is expected to occur. For example, the Perseid Meteor Shower occurs from around July 17 to August 24 and the peak period will occur close to August 13. The date of the peak can vary due to the leap year cycle and one's location on Earth.
We also know where to look in the sky — a point called the radiant from which the meteors seem to emerge. The name of a shower comes from the constellation with the radiant. The major shower with the radiant in Perseus is called the Perseids.
What we can’t know for sure is how many meteors will be seen. A shower is given a number called the zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) which is an estimate of what a stargazer would see during the peak hour under ideal conditions — no light pollution, no clouds, no moon and with the radiant high overhead. The actual number seen will almost always be much lower and it can vary a lot from year to year.
What is the best time to view a meteor shower? While most people prefer to view showers in the evening, this is not the best time in most cases. The best time begins after midnight and improves each hour until just before dawn. This has to do with the direction your location on Earth is facing as Earth orbits the Sun and collides with the debris as this diagram shows:
Here's a great way to think of this: imagine being a passenger in a moving car during a snowstorm. You begin my viewing the falling snow through the back window, then through the side window and, finally, through the front windshield. As your view rotates from back to front, the snow will appear to be hitting your car faster and harder.
Why is faster better? Faster means more energy when the meteor collides with the air in Earth's atmosphere which means brighter meteors, more trains and more fireballs. The fastest meteors are Leonids which blaze across our sky at 44 miles per second or 160,000 mph in pre-dawn hours!
A final thought about shooting stars.… even though we know that meteors aren’t ‘shooting’ and they aren’t ‘stars’, in another sense they truly are. The tiny pieces of rock and metal that become meteors formed inside stars eons ago but were shot into space when the stars exploded as supernovas. So go ahead, call them shooting stars!
Calendar of Major Meteor Showers
| Shower | Dates | Rate (ZHR) | Speed (mi/s) | Radiant | Parent | 2024 Peak |
| Quadrantids | Dec 26 - Jan 16 | 120 | 30 | Bootes | Comet 2003 EH1 |
Jan 3/4 |
| Lyrids | Apr 15 - 29 | 18 | 30 | Lyra | Comet Thatcher |
Apr 22/23 |
| Eta Aquariids | May 19 - 28 | 55 | 41 | Aquarius | Comet Halley |
May 6/7 |
| Delta Aquariids | Jul 12 - Aug 23 | 20 | 25 | Aquarius | Comet 96P/Machholz | Jul 28/29 |
| Perseids | Jul 17 - Aug 24 | 100 | 37 | Perseus | Comet Swift/Tuttle | Aug 12/13 |
| Orionids | Oct 2 - Nov 7 | 20 | 41 | Orion | Comet Halley | Oct 21/22 |
| Leonids | Nov 6-20 | 10 | 44 | Leo | Comet Tempel/Tuttle | Nov 17/18 |
| Geminids | Dec 4-20 | 120 | 22 | Gemini | Asteroid 3200 Phaethon | Dec 13/14 |
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