Is there a meteor shower tonight?

What a meteor shower is

A meteor, or shooting star, is a grain of space dust burning up as it rams into the upper atmosphere at tens of kilometres per second. The streak of light is not the grain itself, which is usually smaller than a pea, but the air and vaporised rock glowing around it, 70 to 120 km above the ground.

On any dark night you can see a few random meteors an hour, called sporadics. A meteor shower is different: it happens on the same dates every year, because it is caused by the Earth crossing a stream of debris left along the orbit of a comet or asteroid. Each time a comet passes the Sun, its ice boils away and releases dust that slowly spreads out along its path. When our orbit cuts through that river of dust, we see a shower. The Orionids, for example, come from Halley's Comet (1P/Halley).

Why the dates repeat

The Earth reaches the same point in its orbit on almost the same date every year, so each shower peaks on about the same calendar date. The precise moment drifts by a few hours from year to year because our calendar year is not exactly one orbit, which is why the peak times in the table differ between 2026 and 2027. We work them out from the solar longitude of each shower's maximum, the position of the Earth in its orbit, as published by the International Meteor Organization.

The radiant: where the meteors seem to come from

All the meteors in a shower travel through space on parallel paths. Seen from the ground, parallel lines seem to spread out from a single point in the distance, the way railway tracks meet at the horizon. That point is the radiant, and showers are named after the constellation it lies in: Perseus for the Perseids, Gemini for the Geminids, Orion for the Orionids.

The radiant matters for two reasons. First, how high it is sets how many meteors you can see: when the radiant is below the horizon, the stream is hitting the other side of the Earth. When it is overhead, you see the full rate. The rate falls with the sine of the radiant's altitude, so at 30 degrees you see half the meteors you would with it overhead. Second, it tells you whether a meteor belongs to the shower: trace its trail backwards, and if it points to the radiant it is a shower member; if not, it is a sporadic or part of a minor shower.

The star chart beside the next peak shows the radiant with meteor trails drawn the way they appear, pointing away from it. Meteors near the radiant look short, because they are coming nearly towards you; those 40 to 60 degrees away have the longest, most impressive trails.

ZHR, and what you will really see

Every shower is listed with a Zenithal Hourly Rate, or ZHR: how many meteors one observer would count in an hour if the radiant were straight overhead and the sky were perfectly dark, with stars visible down to magnitude 6.5. It is a fair way to compare showers, but almost nobody sees the full ZHR. Three things cut it down:

• Radiant height. We multiply the ZHR by the sine of the radiant's altitude at the best hour for your city. That is why the same shower gives different numbers in New York, London and Sydney.
• Sky brightness. Most meteors are faint. Each magnitude of brightness you lose to light pollution removes a share of them set by the shower's population index, about 2 to 3. A typical suburb loses one magnitude, a city two, which is why we show three numbers.
• The Moon. A bright Moon above the horizon acts like light pollution. Our estimate dims the rate when the Moon is up at the best hour, in proportion to how much of it is lit.

These are honest estimates, not promises. Showers vary from year to year, some (such as the Draconids and Leonids) can surprise with outbursts, and meteors arrive in random bursts and lulls. Watching for a full hour gives a much better picture than ten minutes.

How to watch a meteor shower

1. Get away from lights. A dark rural site can show four or five times as many meteors as a city. Even a park away from street lamps helps.
2. Give your eyes 20 minutes. Full dark adaptation takes about 20 to 30 minutes, and one glance at a bright phone screen resets it. Use a red light or turn the screen brightness right down.
3. Lie back and look up. A reclining chair or a mat lets you take in the most sky. Look about halfway up, roughly 45 degrees from the radiant, towards the darkest part of the sky, not straight at the radiant.
4. Go after midnight. For most showers the radiant climbs through the night and rates are highest in the hours before dawn, when your side of the Earth faces forward along its orbit and sweeps up more debris. The Geminids are an exception that is good from mid-evening.
5. Dress warmly and be patient. Plan to stay at least an hour. Meteors come in clumps, with quiet spells in between.

Comets, asteroids and the showers they leave

Most showers come from comets. Halley's Comet gives us two, the Eta Aquariids in May and the Orionids in October, because the Earth passes near its orbit twice a year. Comet Swift-Tuttle, 26 km across, feeds the Perseids, and Comet Tempel-Tuttle the Leonids, famous for meteor storms of thousands an hour in 1833, 1966 and around 2001. The Taurids, from Comet Encke, are slow and known for bright fireballs.

Two major showers come from bodies that look like asteroids. The Geminids come from 3200 Phaethon, a rocky object that passes closer to the Sun than Mercury, and the Quadrantids from 2003 EH1, probably the dead nucleus of a comet. Their debris is denser than comet dust and gives slower, brighter meteors.

Minor showers

The IMO tracks dozens of minor showers with rates of a few an hour, such as the Alpha Monocerotids, the Epsilon Geminids and the October Camelopardalids. They matter to observers recording data, but on a casual night out they are indistinguishable from sporadic meteors. This page sticks to the twelve major showers worth planning a night around.

Related: Geminids 2026 · Moon phase today · Planets visible tonight · What planet is next to the Moon