Enjoy the Warming Weather Under These 3 Upcoming Meteor Showers

Still basking in that post-eclipse celestial glow? We've got great news - there is plenty of reasons to look up again and we are here to share in the skywatching excitement as meteor showers top the upcoming headlines.

It's been a quiet few months for meteors, but the Lyrid meteor shower peaks overnight April 21-22. Unfortunately, the Moon will be at greater than 90% waxing gibbous so a lot of light interference will outshine the fainter meteors. Even under perfect conditions - dark, away from city lights, open view of the sky - only a few meteors per hour are expected to be visible to the naked eye because of the bright Moon. For a dedicated observer, it may still be worth spotting members of one of the oldest known meteor showers - the Lyrids have been observed for 2,700 years!

The Eta Aquarids meteor shower peaks during early May each year. These meteors are known for their speed, which can leave glowing "trains" (incandescent bits of debris in the wake of the meteor) which last for several seconds to minutes. This is expected to be an outburst year, exclaims Bill Cooke, who leads the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "Visual rates could be as high as one per minute in the Southern Hemisphere, with just slightly less in the Northern." The moon will be a waning crescent during its peak overnight May 4-5, so there will not be much moonlight interference.

Grains of cosmic dust streaked through night skies in early May 2023. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through the debris streams left behind by periodic Comet Halley, the annual meteor shower is known as the Eta Aquarids. Credit: Petr Horalek / Institute of Physics in Opava

Cooke is most excited for the Perseid meteor shower in mid-August, "The Perseids are always a stunner and this year, there will be no moonlight to spoil the show." During its peak overnight August 12-13, about 50 to 100 meteors per hour can be seen! Perseids are also known for their fireballs. Fireballs are larger explosions of light and color that can persist longer than an average meteor streak.

In this 30 second exposure, a meteor streaks across the sky during the annual Perseid meteor shower, Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021, in Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Happy skywatching!

By Lauren Perkins
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

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