Meteor showers: when to watch
The major meteor showers of the coming year, how bright the Moon will be at each peak, and the best hours to watch from where you are.
Next meteor showerDraconidsPeaks on the night of Oct 8-9. Up to 10 meteors an hour under ideal dark skies. The Moon will be 3% lit.Upcoming peaks
| Shower | Peak night | Per hour, at best | Moon at peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Draconids | Oct 8-9, 2026 | 10 | 3%, dark sky |
| Orionids | Oct 21-22, 2026 | 20 | 79%, bright Moon |
| Leonids | Nov 17-18, 2026 | 15 | 55%, half Moon |
| Geminids | Dec 14-15, 2026 | 150 | 25%, thin Moon |
| Ursids | Dec 22-23, 2026 | 10 | 98%, full Moon |
| Quadrantids | Jan 3-4, 2027 | 80 | 12%, dark sky |
| Lyrids | Apr 22-23, 2027 | 18 | 95%, full Moon |
| Eta Aquariids | May 6-7, 2027 | 50 | 0%, dark sky |
| Southern Delta Aquariids | Jul 30-31, 2027 | 25 | 10%, dark sky |
| Perseids | Aug 12-13, 2027 | 100 | 87%, bright Moon |
Peak nights in UTC. Rates are for a perfectly dark sky with the radiant overhead; real counts are usually lower.
Best times from your location
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The showers
Draconids
Active Oct 6 to Oct 10. Next peak October 9, 2026. Up to 10 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 20 km/s. Parent: comet Giacobini-Zinner.
Usually a weak shower, but one that has produced dramatic storms in some years. Unlike most showers it is best in the early evening, because its radiant in Draco is highest then. The meteors are slow.
Orionids
Active Oct 2 to Nov 7. Next peak October 21, 2026. Up to 20 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 66 km/s. Parent: Halley's Comet.
Halley's Comet again, this time in autumn. The meteors are very fast and often leave glowing trails. The radiant near Orion's raised club rises in the late evening, so the hours after midnight are best, from either hemisphere.
Leonids
Active Nov 6 to Nov 30. Next peak November 17, 2026. Up to 15 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 71 km/s. Parent: comet Tempel-Tuttle.
Famous for the great meteor storms of 1833, 1966 and 1999, when thousands of meteors fell per hour. In most years it is a modest shower. Leonids are the fastest meteors of the year, best in the hours before dawn.
Geminids
Active Dec 4 to Dec 20. Next peak December 14, 2026. Up to 150 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 35 km/s. Parent: asteroid 3200 Phaethon.
The richest shower of the year and the most reliable. The meteors are bright and fairly slow, and the radiant in Gemini is up from mid-evening, so you don't have to wait until the middle of the night. Dress warmly for December.
Ursids
Active Dec 17 to Dec 26. Next peak December 22, 2026. Up to 10 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 33 km/s. Parent: comet 8P/Tuttle.
A small shower around the December solstice, with its radiant near the Little Dipper. Because the radiant is so far north it is up all night from mid-northern latitudes but never rises for most of the Southern Hemisphere.
Quadrantids
Active Dec 28 to Jan 12. Next peak January 4, 2027. Up to 80 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 41 km/s. Parent: asteroid 2003 EH1.
One of the strongest showers of the year, but its peak lasts only a few hours, so timing and luck matter. The radiant is in the far north of the sky, in the old constellation Quadrans Muralis that gave the shower its name, so it favours the Northern Hemisphere.
Lyrids
Active Apr 14 to Apr 30. Next peak April 23, 2027. Up to 18 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 49 km/s. Parent: comet Thatcher (C/1861 G1).
A modest spring shower with records going back more than 2,500 years. Rates are usually moderate, but the Lyrids occasionally surprise with short outbursts. Best after midnight, when the radiant near the bright star Vega is high.
Eta Aquariids
Active Apr 19 to May 28. Next peak May 6, 2027. Up to 50 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 66 km/s. Parent: Halley's Comet.
Dust from Halley's Comet, seen in the last hours before dawn. It is much better from the Southern Hemisphere and the tropics, where the radiant climbs higher before the sky brightens.
Southern Delta Aquariids
Active Jul 12 to Aug 23. Next peak July 30, 2027. Up to 25 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 41 km/s. Parent: comet 96P/Machholz.
A long, steady summer shower that overlaps with the early Perseids. Its meteors are mostly faint, and it is best seen from the Southern Hemisphere and southern parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
Perseids
Active Jul 17 to Aug 24. Next peak August 13, 2027. Up to 100 an hour. Meteors hit the air at 59 km/s. Parent: comet Swift-Tuttle.
The most popular shower of the year: warm August nights in the north, fast bright meteors and many fireballs. The radiant in Perseus is high in the northern sky before dawn, but meteors start appearing from late evening.
What is a meteor shower?
Comets, and a few asteroids, leave trails of dust along their orbits. When Earth passes through one of these trails, the grains, most no bigger than a grain of sand, hit the upper atmosphere at tens of kilometers per second and burn up about 100 km overhead. Each one is a meteor, or shooting star.
Earth crosses the same trails at the same point in its orbit every year, which is why each shower returns on about the same date. All the meteors in a shower travel in parallel, so seen from the ground they seem to spread out from one point in the sky, the radiant. Showers are named after the constellation the radiant is in: the Perseids come from Perseus, the Geminids from Gemini.
How to watch
Get away from lights. A dark country sky shows three or four times as many meteors as a suburban one.
Give your eyes 20 to 30 minutes to adjust to the dark, and don't look at your phone. Even a moment of screen light resets your night vision.
Lie back and look at a wide patch of sky about halfway up. You don't need to look at the radiant: meteors appear all over the sky, and the ones far from the radiant have the longest trails.
No telescope or binoculars needed. They show too little sky.
Be patient. Meteors come in bursts and lulls, so give it at least an hour.
What the numbers mean
The rates on this page are the zenithal hourly rate, or ZHR: how many meteors one observer would see in an hour under a perfectly dark sky with the radiant straight overhead. Real skies are never that good. When the radiant is lower, meteors are spread over a longer path through the air and fewer are seen, which is why the calculator above gives a lower number that depends on your location and time. Light pollution and moonlight cut the count further, mostly by hiding the fainter meteors.
The Taurids, active through October and November, are not listed because their rates are low, around 5 an hour. They are known for slow, bright fireballs, though, and in some years they produce more of them than usual.
How this is calculated
Shower dates, rates, radiants and speeds come from the International Meteor Organization's working list of visual meteor showers. Peaks are timed from the position of the Sun, as the IMO defines them, and calculated with the Astronomy Engine library, which also gives the Moon's phase and the height of each radiant for your location. The expected rate is the ZHR scaled by the height of the radiant. Actual peaks can come a few hours early or late, and a few showers have surprised observers with outbursts.