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One of the Best Meteor Showers of the Year

In case you missed the Lyrid meteor shower, which peaked in April, here’s your next big chance to see shooting stars flit across the night sky. With an hourly rate of up to 50 meteors, the Eta Aquarids are one of the more spectacular meteor showers of the year—particularly for observers in the Southern Hemisphere.

More upcoming meteor showers

The shower is visible from the second half of April through the end of May, but the peak activity is around the nights of May 5–6 and 6–7 (the date depends on your time zone).

Find the best date for your location

Visible from Almost Everywhere

The best part about the Eta Aquarids is that they are visible from both the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.

That said, if you, like us, dwell at higher northern latitudes, the lingering twilight may spoil things for you. A dark sky is important for meteor spotting. Either way, the Eta Aquarids always tend to be better the farther south you are—for example, in the southern half of the United States or the Southern Hemisphere.

Further possible obstacles include other sources of light pollution, like city lights or the Moon—the Eta Aquarids peak coincides with a Waxing Gibbous Moon, which may outshine some of the fainter shooting stars during parts of the night—and, obviously, the weather.

The good news is that the Waxing Gibbous Moon will set sometime after midnight—check the moonrise and moonset Â鶹ӳ»­ for your location.

Weather forecast in your city

Find Constellation Aquarius

Generally, Eta Aquarid meteors can be seen anywhere in the sky. Our best advice is to wrap up warm, lie on your back or in a lawn chair, and just look up.

However, there’s one location in the sky worth knowing when observing the Eta Aquarids—and, by the way, it’s how the meteor shower got its name. It’s the radiant, the point in the sky where the shooting stars seem to emerge from. This shower’s radiant lies in the constellation Aquarius, more specifically, close to Eta Aquarii, one of the stars within the constellation.

The position of the radiant in the sky is the reason the Eta Aquarids are better for observers at southern latitudes. In general, the farther south you are, the higher Aquarius rises into the morning sky.

To reiterate, it’s not necessary to find the radiant to spot shooting stars, but it’s still useful for getting your bearings and knowing when your chances are highest: As Eta Aquarii and the radiant rise above the horizon, the skies are clear, and you’re somewhere dark, you have a good chance of seeing some meteors.

Find Eta Aquarii in the night sky

Debris from Comet Halley

One of the fun things about the Eta Aquarids is that the streaks across the sky are caused by residues of one of the most famed celestial objects in the cosmos: Halley’s Comet (1P/Halley).

On its trajectory through the solar system, the icy lump sheds small pieces of material (meteoroids)—a trail of space debris that lights up our night sky each time Earth passes through it.

So, if you aren’t among the lucky stargazers who get the chance to see the famous Comet Halley in their lifetime, at least you can say you’ve seen small fractions of it.