Meteor Showers Tonight and 2026 Sky Watch Calendar

A meteor is a grain of cometary dust burning up in the upper atmosphere at tens of kilometres per second. When Earth crosses the densest part of a debris trail, you get a meteor shower — the same shower returns on roughly the same calendar date every year.

Each shower has a radiant: the point on the sky meteors appear to stream from. You'll see them anywhere overhead, but they always trace back to the radiant.

ZHR (Zenithal Hourly Rate) is the number of meteors a single observer would see per hour under a perfectly dark sky with the radiant directly overhead. Real counts are almost always lower — moonlight, light pollution, and radiant altitude all reduce visible meteors.

Peak nights matter most: a shower with ZHR 100 might only show 5–10 meteors per hour two nights before its peak.

Meteor showers are the easiest live astronomy event for anyone with clear skies — no telescope needed. They're also a free, scaled view of the same small-body debris that built the planets.