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Look up at the night sky this week for a chance to see speeding meteors and bright fireballs from two meteor showers peaking around the same time.
The South Delta Aquarids will be most active Monday night through early Tuesday and may display up to 25 meteors per hour depending on your location, according to the American Meteor Society. And on Tuesday night, the little downpour Alpha Capricornids – known for its brilliant fireballs – could also bring five meteors an hour to the celestial party.
A fireball is defined as a meteor brighter than the planet Venus and is caused by a larger-sized meteor that can exceed 1 meter (more than 3 feet) in diameter, according to NASA.
Meteor showers are debris left behind by comets and asteroids orbiting the Sun that Earth encounters annually at some point during its orbital path. The debris trail from the South Delta Aquarids is widespread, so the shower could produce about the same rates of meteors for a few days around its peak, said Robert Lunsford, coordinator of the American Meteor Society’s fireball report.
Wednesday night is the best time to view both showers, Lunsford said, as the moon wanes and loses about 8 percent of its illumination each night. (The moon’s illumination can make fainter meteors difficult to see.) 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.
How to locate a meteor
To see meteor showers, it’s best to look with just your eyes and not use any equipment like binoculars or a telescope, as you’ll want a clear view of the entire sky, said Andrew Rivkin, a planetary astronomer and research scientist with the NASA Applied Physics Laboratory. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
“Find a dark place, away from city lights if you can, with a view of the open sky, and get comfortable,” 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 see meteors will be around 4 a.m. local time, when the radiant, the constellation from which 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 – only up to 10 – because the radiant will be lower in the sky, he added.
The constellation Aquarius is the radiant of the Southern Delta Aquarids, and the constellation Capricorn is the radiant of the Alpha Capricornids. Both constellations will be close to each other in the southwestern part of the sky, Lunsford said.
“Even though they are close to each other, you can tell them apart, because Alpha Capricornids are much slower,” he said. The South Delta aquarids are moving at about 40 kilometers (25 miles) per second, according to NASAand typically lasts half a second.
However, Alpha Capricornids are generally larger and are more likely to last at least a second, Lunsford added. “They’re not as strong as the South Delta aquarids – maybe five per hour at most – but they have been known to produce fireballs. So you can see in one hour four very weak signals and then one nice bright one that will last for a few seconds.”
Although the Perseid meteor shower is still a few weeks away from its peak during the night of Aug. 11, it has also been active in the night sky since mid-July and can be seen along with these other showers, Lunsford said. “You may only see a few per hour, but they tend to be bright and very fast,” he said. “So if you’re starting to doze off, they’ll actually wake you up.”
In early July, a fireball streaked across the sky in broad daylight over parts of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and other northeastern states, sparking excitement across the East Coast. Some meteor enthusiasts captured the rare spectacle on camera.
“It’s a situation where the universe is coming to us. It’s interacting with us in ways 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, kind of constant, the stars are constant – but meteors are things that aren’t normally there. … You may be the only one to see a specific meteor. I think that makes them particularly special.”
meteor showers
Here they are remaining meteor showers which is expected to peak in 2024.
Perseids: August 11-12
Draconids: October 7th to 8th
Orionids: October 20th to 21st
Southern Taurids: November 4th to 5th
North Taurids: November 11th to 12th
Leonidas: November 17th to 18th
Geminids: December 13-14
Ursids: December 21st to 22nd
Remaining moons of 2024
There are five more full moons this year, according to the Farmers’ Almanac.
August 19: Sturgeon Moon
September 17: full moon
October 17: Hunter’s Moon
November 15: Beaver Moon
December 15: Cold Moon
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