The Best Meteor Showers in 2025

Of all the many celestial sights visible around the year, meteor showers seem to captivate public interest more than most. It’s clear why. On a quiet, dark night under the stars, you’re caught by surprise when a bit of space rock creates the dash of a shooting star as it tears into the top of Earth’s atmosphere ― ending its life in a moment before your eyes, after ages in space.

Moreover, annual meteor showers are fairly predictable, coming at about the same times each year.

But like everything else in amateur astronomy, meteor observing goes best with patience and foreknowledge.

What Are Meteors?

A meteor is the streak of light you see when a bit of interplanetary debris vaporizes as it rips into Earth’s upper atmosphere. They usually arrive at a speed of 30 to 70 km per second (20 to 45 miles per second). Although some meteors look so bright you could almost touch them, they occur at altitudes of 80 to 120 km (50 to 75 miles).

Meteors are pretty common. If you gaze steadily into a dark, moonless night sky somewhere far from city lights, you’ll likely see a sporadic (random) meteor a few times per hour throughout the year. But showers bring the main action.

Meteors range in brightness from tiny flicks just at the limit of visibility to dramatically bright fireballs that outshine Venus and maybe even light up the landscape around you. The rarest of these, called a bolide, shatters explosively into pieces during its descent and, if it penetrates deep enough into the atmosphere, can create a boom or rumble that reaches you a minute or two later. Those are once in a lifetime events.

Because they arrive so fast, even small meteor particles produce a lot of light. Typically they’re no bigger than large sand grains or tiny pebbles. One the size of a pea can create a meteor that's dramatically bright. Those high velocities give each little particle a whole lot of kinetic energy, which converts to heat and light due to air friction and shock heating in the upper atmosphere. Many people think a meteor occurs because the particle “burns up.” But actually, as the particle vaporizes, the shock wave spreading away from it heats air molecules to thousands of degrees. The air molecules usually cool in a split second, giving off light as they do. (Here’s the in-depth explanation.)

What Is a Meteor Shower?

Most meteor particles (they’re called meteoroids when still in space) are bits of debris that were shed by comet nuclei crumbling when warmed by the Sun. The debris continues along the comet’s orbit, eventually spreading all around the orbit and out to the sides as well. Whenever Earth, in its own orbit, passes through one of these sparse streams of grit, the result is a meteor shower. Some sporadic meteors are from old meteor streams that have spread out and lost their identity. Others are rockier debris from old asteroid collisions.

During the half dozen strongest annual showers, under a dark sky you may see something like 20 to 60 meteors or more per hour late at night. Some showers last just a few hours. Others, older and more diffuse, last for weeks.

Keep watch for at least a half hour during one of the strongest showers, and you’ll notice something: Not only are meteors more frequent than usual, they appear to fly in directions away from a particular spot in the sky. That spot is called the shower’s radiant. It’s the perspective point where all the shower members (which are flying in parallel) would appear to come from if you could see them approaching from far away in space, instead of in just the last second or so as they enter the atmosphere. They can appear anywhere in your sky. But their paths, if you trace them backward far enough, all intersect the radiant spot.

To get a better sense of the picture, check out the interactive meteor-stream animations created by Ian Webster. The one below shows particles spread out around the orbit of Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, the comet responsible for the Perseid shower. (Have some fun with it: Click and drag the animation to get different perspectives, or go to meteorshowers.org to try a different shower.)

(Note: Most of the actual meteor streams are somewhat narrower than displayed; the animations are based on meteor directions and speeds measured from the ground, and slight measurement errors broaden the range of 3D paths shown here in space.)

Meteor Shower Radiants

A shower usually gets its name not from its parent object but from the constellation where the radiant lies. For example, August’s well-known Perseid shower has its radiant in Perseus, and December’s Geminids appear to radiate from Gemini. One notable exception is January’s Quadrantid shower, named for the now-defunct constellation Quadrans Muralis. Its radiant is in northern Boötes.

The higher the shower’s radiant is in your sky, the more nearly straight down the meteoroids arrive, and thus the more you'll see in a given area of sky. When the radiant is low, we see few. When the radiant is below your horizon, no shower members appear at all.

Meteor showers are usually at their best after midnight, because most radiants are highest in the hours before dawn. The graphic below shows why: Morning is when you’re on the side of Earth facing forward along Earth’s orbit. We circle the Sun at about 30 km (18 miles) per second, so interplanetary debris slams into the morning sky especially fast, making each meteor brighter than it would be if it had hit in the evening, when it would be catching up to Earth from behind.

Think of raindrops hitting your car’s windshield. If the car is moving forward, the drops hit harder and more plentifully. In addition, the radiant of the raindrops shifts to somewhat in front of you. You can see this in your headlights on a rainy or snowy night.

Solar-system dynamicists have gotten rather good at predicting when a particular shower might display an extra burst of activity. Usually these bursts, typically lasting just a few hours, are from thin, denser ribbons of particles embedded in the larger stream — particles that were ejected by the parent comet only decades or centuries ago and have not had time to disperse much. And some meteoroid streams have a higher proportion of large particles than others, which create more fireballs.

The table and descriptions below list the year’s best and most dependable annual displays. (There are many more: The International Astronomical Union now recognizes more than 100 well-defined meteor showers and hundreds of other “shower candidates” that remain unconfirmed. But most are so weak that it takes trained and very patient observers, or automated cameras, to detect the pattern.)

How to Watch Meteor Showers

Find a dark location with an open view overhead as far from urban light pollution as you can get, and where no local lights glare into your eyes. Find a way to block any lights you can’t escape and the Moon, too, if it’s up; you want your best night vision so you can see more meteors. Your night vision improves for at least your first 30 to 45 minutes in the dark.

Make yourself comfortable in a reclining chair, and wear more warm clothing than you imagine you'll need. When you’re exposed to a wide expanse of clear sky, radiational cooling chills you to a surprising degree even in summer. Especially if you’re out in the coldest hours of the late night, and if you aren’t moving!

A sleeping bag provides warmth and mosquito protection. Put DEET insect repellent on your exposed parts if it might be buggy. The reclining chair matters if ticks could be around. Lie back, gaze into the darkest part of your sky (usually straight up), contemplate the stars, and be patient.

For more on watching, counting, and studying meteors, see Advanced Meteor Observing and other articles in the Meteor section of our website. To dive deeper, check out the abundant material on the website of the International Meteor Organization, recently revamped and modernized.

Meteor Showers in 2025

The dates in the table below are for the predawn hours in North America closest to the predicted peak of Earth’s passage through the meteoroid stream. Most showers are also active to some degree for a number of nights, sometimes many nights, before and after the predicted peak date.

Important: The listed peak rate is what’s called the “zenithal hourly rate,” which is what a very lucky viewer would see under ideal conditions: a very dark sky free of moonlight or light pollution (stars of magnitude 6½ detectable naked-eye), with full dark adaptation and the radiant high overhead. Rarely are we so blessed, so most likely you’ll see lower rates than those listed.

January 3: The Quadrantids

This will likely be a poor year for the “Quads” if you’re in North America or Europe. This shower has a brief, strong peak that lasts 6 hours or less, with little activity before and after. This year the peak should be centered near 17:45 Universal Time (12:45 p.m. EST) on January 3rd, according to the International Meteor Organization. That would be good for the northwestern Pacific Ocean. Other sources give predictions as early 15:00 UT (10 a.m. EST, 7 a.m. PST), good for Alaska and possibly for the West Coast as the beginning of dawn approaches. There will be no moonlight.

When everything does align just right, the Quads deliver at least 1 or 2 meteors visible per minute under excellent sky conditions. In fact, the nominal zenithal hourly rate (which, again, is for an observer with perfect viewing conditions) is a very high 110. In some years it has reached 200.

The shower's radiant is in northernmost Boötes, between the end of the Big Dipper’s handle and the head of Draco, in the defunct constellation Quadrans Muralis. It’s highest before dawn.

The parent body of this shower is a small object designated 2003 EH₁ for its discovery year. (It’s also known as asteroid 196256 but hasn’t yet been named.) It loops around the Sun every 5½ years between the orbits of Earth and Jupiter. Only in 2004 did meteor specialist Peter Jenniskens discover that this body is responsible for the Quadrantids. It’s not an active comet — more likely it's an “extinct comet” that no longer has any ice to evaporate.

April 22: The Lyrids

More than 3½ months pass until the next major annual shower. April’s Lyrids are usually weak; you might glimpse one every 5 minutes on average. But surprises occur; counts exceeded one a minute during a Lyrid outburst in 1982. The main part of the shower generally lasts three days, but the center of the stream is generally narrow; the predicted peak this year (near 13^h UT April 22nd) is best for Alaska and maybe the West Coast.

That morning the Moon, just past last quarter, will pose some interference after it rises around 3 a.m. local time.

May 4: The Eta Aquariids

This annual shower originates from none other than Halley’s Comet, and its meteors come in fast: 66 km (41 miles) per second. This blazing speed often creates shock-wave trains — looking like glowing smoke trails — that linger for several seconds after the meteors themselves have come and gone.

For those in the Southern Hemisphere, the Eta Aquariids are often the best shower of the year. They’re not nearly so good for us northerners; the shower’s radiant (in the Water Jar asterism of Aquarius) stays low before dawn as seen from mid-northern latitudes, so rates for us are low.

This year the roughly first-quarter Moon sets well before the radiant rises. The shower remains fairly active for a week or so around the nominal peak date.

Mid-July to Mid-August: The Delta Aquariids

This long-lasting shower, more formally called the Southern Delta Aquariids, has a radiant below the celestial equator and thus, like the Eta Aquariids, is best seen from the Southern Hemisphere. The shower is at least slightly active all the way from mid-July to mid-August, even overlapping the Perseids, but it’s most active for a week around its nominal maximum date of July 30th.

For us mid-northerners, the radiant is well above the southern horizon for a couple of hours before midnight to a few hours after midnight. Moonlight interferes during those hours from about August 2nd through 15th this year.

August 13: The Perseids

Lots of people have heard of the Perseid shower, because it often delivers an average of a meteor per minute under pleasant summer skies during vacation season when more people than usual are in unspoiled rural darkness.

But this year the waning gibbous Moon will seriously compromise the shower around the night of maximum activity. On the morning of the 13th, the 84%-sunlit Moon will rise around the end of evening twilight and shine all night.

You may catch some Perseids, however. The brightest 25% of them, more or less, will probably shine through. Keep the glare of the Moon or other bright lights out of your view.

The numbers will be extra-low in the evening; they increase through the night as the Perseid radiant rises high. (It’s near the Perseus Double Cluster just under Cassiopeia.) But the Perseid radiant does clear the northeastern horizon as early as 8 p.m. When the radiant is low, the few Perseids you might see will be dramatically long, “Earth grazers” that are skimming almost horizontally far across the top of the atmosphere.

The shower builds up slowly starting as early as the late July, then drops off more rapidly in the nights after the peak. This year, if you watch in the hour before dawn, the Moon will be a problem from about August 5th through the 16th or 17th.

The Perseids are bits of debris shed by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the Sun every 130 years. Careful observers first realized that the Perseids are an annual event in the 1830s.

October 22 and 23: The Orionids

Finally, a nice moonless shower! The Orionids, like the Eta Aquariids of May, are bits of Halley’s Comet; Earth makes two passages through Halley’s meteoroid stream in our annual circle around the Sun. So, like the Eta Aquariids, this shower runs for at least several nights.

The Orionid radiant (in Orion's dim club, north of Betelgeuse) is highest in the hour before the beginning of dawn. The Orionids performed richly from 2006 through 2009, boasting peak rates of more than 50 meteors per hour. Since then the activity has dwindled to a fraction of that.

Mid-October to mid-November: The Southern Taurids
Late October to late November: The Northern Taurids

Fireballs coming? The broad, weak, combined Taurid display sputters along from mid-October through mid- to late November. It typically produces five or 10 meteors per hour around the poorly defined maximum in early November, when the two branches of the shower overlap. Moreover, while both components include bits of debris shed by Comet 2P/Encke, a recent analysis shows that a host of other objects — near-Earth asteroids, collisional fragments, and dormant cometary nuclei — may be creating several overlapping streams of particles. Consequently, both Taurid components have broad maxima that aren’t easy to pin down.

What makes the Taurids potentially exciting is that they are known for a high proportion of bright fireballs — occasionally, an extremely bright one that makes the news. And 2025 might be a Taurid “fireball swarm year” according to one prediction.

The Taurids strike the atmosphere at a relatively slow 19 miles (30 km) per second. That’s because they are catching up with Earth from behind, which means they streak less quickly than most meteors and do well in the evening hours.

November 17: The Leonids

Another moonless shower, but not a strong one. The Leonid shower’s parent comet, 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, tends to leave narrow, concentrated streams of debris. These produced prodigious displays in 1833, 1866, 1966, 1999, 2001, and 2002, around times when their parent comet, with its 33-year period, swung through the inner solar system. Since then the Leonids have returned to being quite modest, with a peak zenithal hourly rate of about 15.

Be patient, and you'll likely catch an occasional zip radiating from the direction of Leo’s Sickle asterism in the hours before dawn. The Moon, a waning crescent, will be out of the picture this year.

December 13: The Geminids

This shower in frigid nights is often the year’s best, with upward of 100 meteors visible per hour radiating from a spot near Castor in Gemini as shown above. And this year the Moon is merely a waning crescent! The Geminid radiant is well up in the sky by 9 or 10 p.m. as seen from mid-northern latitudes. It passes highest overhead around 2 a.m.

This year the Moon is a thick waning crescent, not too bright. It won’t rise until around 1 a.m. local time on the morning of the 13th and 2 a.m. on the morning of the 14th.

Geminid meteors come from 3200 Phaethon, an asteroid discovered as recently as 1983 that circles the Sun every 3.3 years. The particles are denser and stronger than typical shower meteors. Phaethon might be considered a “rock comet” that sheds bits when its rocky surface heats up to roughly 1,300°F (700°C) at perihelion, blazingly close to the Sun.

December 22: The Ursids

Although the Ursid shower usually delivers only a modest 10 meteors per hour even under the best conditions, it has the advantage of a radiant near the bowl of the Little Dipper in the north — so it’s up all night for skywatchers at northern latitudes. Nevertheless, it’s highest in the hours before dawn. The Moon will be new and out of the picture.

P.S.: Did I mention that meteor observing requires patience? Kind of like the rest of amateur astronomy? In the Sunday comics after the 2022 Geminids, there appeared this Arlo and Janice strip.