A meteor shower is the one sky event where your eyes beat any telescope. On a good night you can see dozens of shooting stars an hour with nothing more than a dark sky and some patience.
A meteor shower is the one sky event where your eyes beat any telescope. On a good night you can see dozens of shooting stars an hour with nothing more than a dark sky and some patience. This lesson explains what you are actually seeing, why showers return on the same dates every year, and how to plan a night that gets the best out of one.
A shooting star is not a star. It is a speck of space dust, a meteoroid, hitting the top of the atmosphere so fast that it heats the air around it until it glows.
Comets, and a few rocky asteroids, shed dust along their orbits. Over centuries that dust spreads into a stream around the Sun. Earth crosses each stream at the same point in its own orbit every year, so each shower returns on roughly the same dates.
ZHR, the zenithal hourly rate, is 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.
A good night comes down to three things: a dark sky, eyes that have adjusted to it, and patience.
You need a telescope or binoculars to see a meteor shower.
Your eyes are the best tool. Meteors cross huge areas of sky in under a second, and a telescope or binoculars show such a tiny patch that you would miss almost all of them.
You have to look straight at the radiant.
Meteors appear all over the sky. The ones near the radiant look short because they are coming almost straight at you. Looking 40 to 60 degrees away from it often shows longer, more striking trails.
You now know why showers return on the same dates, what the ZHR really promises and how to set up a night that gets the most from one. The meteor tracker shows which showers are active tonight, the best time to watch from your town and where to look.