Meteor shower calendar: 8 annual showers by year

The major showers peak on close to the same dates every year, from the Quadrantids in the first days of January to the Ursids at the December solstice. What changes year to year is the moon, and that decides how much you actually see.

What are the major meteor showers?

When is the next meteor shower?

The nearest peak is always within a few weeks, because the eight showers are spread across the calendar from January to December. Pick the year below to get the exact dates, the weekday each peak falls on and the moon phase that night.

Does the moon affect how many meteors you see?

Published hourly rates assume a perfectly dark sky, the radiant overhead and an observer who misses nothing. Real conditions never match that, and the largest single correction is moonlight. A shower peaking within about a week of new moon is seen close to its potential; the same shower peaking under a gibbous moon loses most of its fainter meteors. Each year page above marks which peaks fall in the dark half of the lunar cycle, computed from the same lunation series that drives the moon phase pages.

Related calendars

Day of the year · Event countdowns · When is it? · Date calculator