Lyrids 2016: Meteor shower peaks Friday morning
Each spring, the Lyrid meteor shower arrives just as it starts to get almost warm enough to lie outside watching the stars.
The Lyrids peak Friday morning, but this year's show isn't expected to be a particularly good one, thanks to a brilliant full moon that will likely wash out most of the meteors.
Still, it doesn't hurt to look out for them if you're up before dawn — the Lyrids do, in some years, produce "outbursts" of up to 100 meteors per hour – for example, U.S. sky watchers were treated to one in 1982.
They're also relatively fast and bright (similar to the brightest stars in the Big Dipper constellation), and often leave glowing dust trains behind them that can last for several seconds, NASA says.
And NASA's all-sky cameras have already captured quite a few Lyrid "fireballs" — meteors that are so bright, they can easily be seen even in a moonlit sky, SpaceWeather reports.
Your best bet, if you want to catch some shooting stars, is to:
- Look before dawn on Friday morning.
- Find somewhere as dark and clear as possible.
- Try and position yourself to block out the full moon with something like a tree or a building.
The meteors will appear to come from the constellation Lyra, but should be visible all across the sky.
10-20 meteors per hour
The spring meteor shower typically isn't a blockbuster like the Perseids in August – NASA calls it "relatively mild" with 10 to 20 meteors per hour during the peak (compared to up to 100 per hour for the Perseids).
While the meteor shower officially lasts from April 16 to 25, it's one where the peak "tends to come in a burst and usually lasts for less than a day," says the astronomy website EarthSky. That means most of the meteors will be visible early Friday morning.
Lyrid meteors appear when Earth passes through the dust and debris left behind by the comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher, discovered by A.E. Thatcher, an amateur astronomer in New York, in 1861. That was the last time the comet made its closest approach to the sun – something that only happens once every 415.5 years, NASA says.
The Lyrid meteor shower was first recorded by the Chinese in 687 BC, making it one of the oldest known.
