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Look to the night sky this week for a chance to see high-speed meteors and bright fireballs from two meteor showers that will peak at the same time.
The southern Delta Aquarids will be most active Monday night into the early hours of Tuesday and could spot up to 25 meteors per hour depending on your location, according to the American Meteor Society. And on Tuesday night, the small Alpha Capricornus stream – known for its bright fireballs – could also bring five meteors an hour to the sky party.
A fireball is defined as a meteor that is brighter than the planet Venus and is caused by a larger meteor that can exceed 1 meter (more than 3 feet) in diameter, according to NASA.
Meteor streams are debris left behind by comets and asteroids orbiting the sun that Earth encounters every year at some point in its orbital path. The debris path for the Southern Delta Aquarids is scattered, so the shower can produce roughly the same levels of meteors for several days around its peak, said Robert Lunsford, fireball reporting coordinator for the American Meteor Society.
Wednesday night is the best time to view both showers, Lunsford said, as the moon wanes and loses about 8 percent of its brightness each night. (Moonlight can block the view of fainter meteors.) On Monday, the moon will be about 34% full, and on Wednesday the orb will be 16% full, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
To see a meteor shower, it’s best to look with just your eyes and not use equipment like binoculars or a telescope, as you’ll want a clear view of the entire sky, said Andrew Rivkin, a planetary astronomer and scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
“Get somewhere dark, away from city lights if you can, with a view of the open sky, and settle in,” Rivkin said. He recommends sitting outside for at least 10 to 15 minutes to allow your eyes to adjust to the dark.
The best time to view meteors will be around 4 a.m. local time, when the radiant, the constellation from which the meteor showers appear to originate, will be highest in the sky, Lunsford said. Both meteor showers will be visible around the world, although the Northern Hemisphere may see lower rates of meteors per hour – as few as 10 – because the radiant will be lower in the sky, he added.
The constellation Aquarius is the radiant for the Southern Delta Aquarians and the constellation Capricorn is the radiant for the Alpha Capricorns. Both constellations will be side by side in the southwestern sky, Lunsford said.
“Even though they’re right next to each other, you can tell them apart because Alpha Capricorns are much slower,” he said. Southern Delta Aquarids are about 40 kilometers (25 miles) per second, according to NASA, and typically last half a second.
Alpha Capricorns, however, are usually larger and more likely to last at least a second, Lunsford added. “They’re not as strong as the Southern Delta Aquarids—maybe five per hour at best—but they’re well known for producing fireballs. So you might see after an hour four fairly faint ones and then one nice bright one that will last for a few seconds.
While the Perseid meteor shower is still a few weeks away from its peak on the evening of Aug. 11 has also been active in the night sky since mid-July and can be seen along with these other showers, Lunsford said. “You might only see a few per hour, but they’re usually bright and very fast,” he said. “So if you start dozing off, they’ll really wake you up.”
Earlier in July, a fireball tore through the sky in broad daylight over parts of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and other states in the northeastern US, causing a stir along the East Coast. Some meteor enthusiasts caught the rare sight on camera.
“This is a situation where the universe comes to us. It interacts with us in a way that maybe we don’t normally think about,” Rivkin said. “We see the sun every day and we see the moon. They’re up there, sort of constant, the stars are constant – but meteors are things that aren’t usually there. … You may be the only one who has ever seen a particular meteor. I think that makes them extra special.”
Here are the rest of the meteor showers expected to peak in 2024.
Perseids: August 11-12
Draconids: October 7-8
Orionids: October 20-21
Southern Taurides: November 4-5
Northern Taurides: November 11-12
Leonidas: November 17-18
Gemini: December 13-14
Ursidis: December 21-22
The remaining moons of 2024
There are five more full moons this year, according to the Farmer’s Almanac.
August 19: sturgeon moon
September 17: Harvest Moon
October 17: Hunter’s Moon
November 15: Beaver Moon
December 15: Cold Moon
