Meteor Shower Tonight

How to use it

• Place. The planner opens on the main city of your device's time zone. Search for your own city, or type coordinates such as 40.7, -74.0. Your choice is remembered in this browser only, and the planets visible tonight planner opens on it too.
• Night of. Tonight's night, from sunset to sunrise, unless you pick another date. After midnight it shows the night you are in until dawn. The Next peaks buttons jump to each shower's peak night.
• The sky opens on the leading shower's radiant at its best time tonight, or now if it is dark, as you would see it from your place: the stars, the constellations, the Milky Way and the Moon. The trails show where its meteors appear; on the shower's peak night there are as many as you might see in an hour then from a dark site. Drag to look around (on a phone, swipe sideways), slide the time, or press play for a time-lapse, an hour every 15 seconds.
• The chart runs from sunset to sunrise. The darker the background, the darker the sky: meteors show best once the Sun is 18° below the horizon, the end of astronomical twilight. Each line is a shower's radiant, its height above the horizon through the night, drawn bold while the sky is dark and the radiant at least 10° up. The band along the bottom shows when the Moon is up, brighter the more of it is lit.
• Each shower's card says when to watch, where its radiant is, what the Moon does in that time, how many meteors to expect on its peak night, and how fast its meteors are.

Times are in the place's own time zone. Where the Sun never gets 18° down, as in summer at high latitudes, the planner uses the darkest part of the night, with the Sun at least 12° down, and says so.

How to watch a meteor shower

1. Get away from lights. NASA's advice is to find a place well away from city lights and street lights. The darker the sky, the more of the fainter meteors you see.
2. Lie back and take in the whole sky. Meteors can appear anywhere, so the eye alone is the right instrument: binoculars and telescopes show only a small patch of sky.
3. Give your eyes time. After about 30 minutes in the dark your eyes adapt and you begin to see meteors.
4. Be patient. Meteors arrive unevenly, with lulls and short bursts, and the show lasts until dawn.

Why the time of night matters

A shower's meteors all seem to come from one point in the sky, the radiant. The higher the radiant, the more of the shower's meteors reach the sky above you. The rate the International Meteor Organization gives assumes the radiant overhead; with it lower, one observer sees about that rate times the sine of the radiant's height, so half at 30° and a sixth at 10°.

Most radiants rise in the evening and climb through the night, so the best hours are usually after midnight, before the sky begins to brighten. The planner draws each radiant's height and marks its highest point in the dark.

What the numbers mean

• ZHR, the zenithal hourly rate: the number of meteors an ideal observer would see in an hour under a perfectly clear sky, with stars down to magnitude 6.5 visible and the radiant overhead. It is the International Meteor Organization's standard measure of a shower's strength at its maximum.
• Maximum: the moment Earth passes the densest part of the stream. The IMO gives it as a position of Earth on its orbit, the Sun's longitude, so it falls on about the same date every year, a few hours later from one year to the next until a leap day resets it.
• Speed: how fast the meteors meet the atmosphere, from about 11 km/s (very slow) to 72 km/s (very fast). The Leonids, at 71 km/s, are among the fastest; the Geminids, at 35 km/s, are medium-speed.

The Moon and meteors

Moonlight hides the fainter meteors. A first-quarter Moon sets around midnight, leaving the darker hours before dawn; a last-quarter Moon rises around midnight, just as most radiants climb; near full, the Moon is up all night. The Moon is why one year's display can be much better than the next: the IMO notes only a waxing crescent at the Geminid maximum in 2026, but a Full Moon at the Geminids in 2027.

Where meteor showers come from

Each shower is Earth passing through a stream of dust shed along the orbit of a comet or, for a few showers, an asteroid. Earth crosses each stream at the same point in its orbit every year, so the shower returns on about the same date.

• The Orionids in October and the Eta Aquariids in May both come from Halley's Comet (1P/Halley).
• The Perseids come from Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, the Leonids from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, the Ursids from Comet 8P/Tuttle, the Draconids from Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner and the Lyrids from Comet C/1861 G1 (Thatcher).
• Both branches of the Taurids belong to the complex of Comet 2P/Encke.
• The Geminids and Quadrantids come from asteroids: 3200 Phaethon and 2003 EH1.

How the planner works it out

• Showers. The thirteen major showers, with their activity periods, maxima, radiants, speeds and rates, come from the International Meteor Organization's 2027 Meteor Shower Calendar and its working list of visual meteor showers. Each radiant drifts a little every night; the planner follows the IMO's table of its position every five days.
• Maximum times. A shower's maximum is the moment the Sun reaches the shower's longitude, worked out with Astronomy Engine. In our tests they agree with the maxima the IMO publishes for 2026 and 2027, within a few minutes where it gives the minute.
• The sky. Sunset, twilight, the Moon's phase, rising and setting come from the same engine as the planets visible tonight planner, checked against NASA JPL's Horizons system and the U.S. Naval Observatory. The radiant's height is worked out every ten minutes for your place.
• Rates. On a peak night the estimate is the ZHR times the sine of the radiant's height at its best dark hour: what one observer would see from a dark site without moonlight.
• What it leaves out. Weather, light pollution, trees and buildings, and a shower's own changes from year to year: some returns are weaker than the listed rate, and some showers occasionally produce outbursts.

Place names come from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). The 3D solar system shows the planets, the Moon and the Sun from any time and place.