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| Meteor during Perseid meteor shower / Kim MyoungSung / Wikimedia CC BY 2.0 |
During most meteor showers, you can see plenty of meteors, many of them will be faint streaks of light and some bright streaks and once in a while a brilliant fireball. The darker the sky, the more meteors you can see.
I have seen many meteors during meteor showers and I was lucky once to see what is called a blue whizzer. A blue whizzer is a large meteor burning up with a blue color.
Best Meteor Showers
There are some good meteor showers to watch, and the nice thing is that these meteor showers can be predicted when they will happen so you can plan when to be out all night looking up.
Here is a list of the better meteor showers. Some years they are better than other years. The peak dates for each meteor can change slightly for each year.
- Quadrantids – January 4th
- Eta Aquarids – May 5th
- Perseids – August 12th, this meteor shower is the most popular because it’s in mid summer and everyone goes out to watch and it is the most predicable.
- Leonids – November 17th, this shower at times can be spectacular like it was in the late 1990s or it can be slow.
- Geminids – December 13/14th. Usually a very good meteor shower. Just dress warm in the northern hemisphere.
There are also many more minor meteor showers as well. And some years the minor ones can be as good or better than the major meteor showers.
For most of these showers, the best time to watch the meteor showers is between midnight and sunrise. Some of the brightest and largest meteors I have seen were just before sunrise.
The peak times change slightly each year for each shower, so you will need to find the peak date and time for each shower each year.
The moon can be a problem some years, if the moon is full at the same time the meteor shower is going on, you might only be able to see the brightest of them. Each year this changes.
How to Watch Meteor Showers
The best place is the darkest place you can be, without streetlights and city lights. Even a park in the city can be darker than a lot of areas in the city. Going out to the country, mountains or beach will be a better place to watch a meteor shower.
Darker areas close to the city, astronomy clubs will have sites to go to during meteor shower, called star parties. Call your local observatory or astronomy club to find out.
Even for the summer showers, it can get pretty cool by sunrise, so take enough clothes to be comfortable, maybe a blanket or sleeping bag.
A lounge chair is best since you will be looking up most of the night, and if you are sitting in a chair it won’t be long before your neck is really hurting. Also take some misquote repellent as well and wear long pants and long sleeves.
What you don’t need to see meteors are binoculars or a telescope, since meteors cover a large portion of the sky, these items would actually hinder you from seeing meteors.
Hearing Meteors on Your Radio
You can hear meteors on your FM radio. What you will actually hear are other FM stations in distant cities. This happens when the meteor burns up in the atmosphere and ionizes the layer called the ionosphere. The ionosphere is the layer that bounces FM radio waves.
Find a spot on the FM dial where there aren’t any local or nearby stations.
Keep your radio there during a meteor shower and you will hear stations from cities as far away as 1000 miles, some of these will be less than a second long to 15 seconds or longer, these are called meteor pings.
Car radios are actually very good for this. For much more information about this, please read How to Hear Meteors on Your FM Radio.
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