Meteor shower forecast
Know when the sky is about to fall.
See the next meteor shower you can watch from where you are — the peak night, the best hours, the moon, and where to look. No telescope needed.
Don't miss the next peak.
Free — one push the evening a shower peaks, and only when the sky is clear.
See it from where you live
Search your city for its own forecast — peak times in your local hour, radiant altitude, and how good this year's showers actually look from there.
The 2026 meteor shower calendar
Eleven headline showers light up the sky each year. Here's when each one peaks — and how good it is.
Is anything falling tonight?
The honest answer changes every night — active streams, the moon, your clouds. We compute it live for your location.
How to watch a meteor shower
Three things, no equipment.
Get away from city lights
Light pollution is the enemy. A dark rural sky can turn a handful of meteors into dozens.
Look up after midnight
Most showers are best between midnight and dawn, when your side of Earth turns to face the debris stream head-on.
Let your eyes adapt
Give your eyes 20 minutes in the dark and put the phone away. Then just watch — meteors can streak across any part of the sky.
What is a meteor shower, exactly?
Every meteor shower is the Earth driving through the dust trail of a comet (or, twice a year, an asteroid). Each grain — most no bigger than sand — hits the atmosphere at 20–70 kilometres per second and burns up in a streak of ionized light. Because the whole stream moves in parallel, the streaks all appear to fan out from one point among the stars, the radiant, and the shower is named for the constellation that hosts it: Perseids from Perseus, Geminids from Gemini.
The crossings repeat on schedule — the same weeks, every year — which is why meteor showers are the rare sky event you can plan a night around. What changes from year to year is everything else: the moon, your latitude, your weather. That is the gap this site closes — the calendar tells you the week; our per-city forecasts tell you whether your sky, your moon and your hours make it worth the alarm clock.
Learn the craft
Long-form guides behind every number the forecasts quote.
Every meteor shower headline quotes a ZHR — and almost every viewer sees fewer. What the Zenithal Hourly Rate actually measures, why your count is lower, and how to turn ZHR into an honest expectation for your own sky.
Why 2 a.m. beats 10 p.m., why the moon matters more than the forecast, and how to pick the one night of the year that is actually worth losing sleep for.
A practical night-sky recipe that works on the first try: which lens and settings to use, how to focus in the dark, where to point relative to the radiant, and how to stack a composite honestly.
Light pollution decides more of your meteor count than the shower does. How to read the Bortle scale, how far from a city is far enough, and how to pick a safe, legal spot for a night out.
Popular cities
Forecasts by country
Common questions
When is the next meteor shower?+
The next major shower is the Draconids, peaking on the night of October 8, 2026. Its page carries the full almanac — and a forecast computed for your own city.
How many meteor showers happen each year?+
Eleven major annual showers are worth planning around, from the Quadrantids in January to the Ursids in December, plus dozens of minor streams that mostly enthusiasts track. The calendar above shows when each headline shower peaks — and the quiet gaps between them.
Do I need a telescope or binoculars?+
No — quite the opposite. Meteors cross tens of degrees of sky in under a second; any instrument’s narrow field would make you miss nearly all of them. The right equipment is a reclining chair, warm layers, and twenty minutes of patience while your eyes adapt to the dark.
Why do forecasts promise more meteors than I see?+
Because headline rates (ZHR) describe a perfect dark sky with the radiant overhead — a laboratory condition. City glow, moonlight and a low radiant each take their cut. Our per-city forecasts do that subtraction for you honestly, which is why their numbers are smaller and truer.
Never miss a shower again
The app does it for you — a free push alert the evening a shower peaks over your city, and only when the sky is actually clear. Out now on iPhone; the Android version is on its way.