This first of the expected annual showers should be active in the night between January 3 and 4.
See the end note about enlarging these diagrams.
This is the view for North America as the “radiant” (named for a defunct constellation Quadrans Muralis between Boötes and Ursa Major) climbs into view in the northeast. It will continue to get higher until dawn.
This view explains why. Earth is seen from ecliptic north, that is, from vertically north of its orbital plane. The broad arrow shows the advance of Earth in one minute. The time is the same as for the horizon scene. For Europe it is dawn and the Quadrantid radiant is overhead; for America it is the middle of the night and the radiant is rising into view in the northeast. The dotted line represents merely those meteors that are overhead; in space the stream of particles is vastly wider than the Earth.
As with many of the year’s showers, the meteors are likely to be more abundant after midnight, because Earth is traveling forward to meet them. The Quadrantids come from slightly ahead and also quite steeply from the north, so they are a good shower for north-hemisphere observers.
The peak times for meteor showers are not very certainly predictable. They are not always on the same calendar dates, because of leap years. The scientific way of describing them is by the longitude of the point at which the center of the meteor stream seems to cross Earth’s orbit. Calculated from this, the Quadrantic peak this year should be January 3 about 20h Universal Time. That is from 5 to 8 hours earlier by North American clocks, therefore in the daylight or in the evening hours when the radiant is still low. So the time to watch for Quadrantids should be from around midnight and on into the hours when the radiant is high.
You’ll know a Quadrantid if its streak seems traceable back to that radiant. If the “shooting star” is on some other course, it’s a “sporadic” meteor.
I’ve made a few improvements to my Astronomical Calendar for the year (see the menu at the top). The meteor showers are listed not strictly by their supposed peak times, which in many cases could be rather meaningless, but at the beginning of the calendar date during which the peak probably falls, so that they won’t be missed by looking a day too late; but the peak times calculated from the longitudes are also given. With the proviso that they are uncertain! They are, after all, based on the counts that are made by observers eachyear.
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DIAGRAMS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and from the drop-down list choose “View image” Or from that list choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad, tap with three fingers to enlarge. I would be glad to know whether these work for you, and what the equivalent actions are on a phone. I would welcome learning of any other methods.
Love these diagrams. As someone who doesn’t know much of anything about astronomy, it is so interesting to look at your illustrations of how things move relative to eachother and try to work out how it connects to what I’m seeing in the sky, from my own particular spot on earth here. I think they are definitely the best explanations I’ve ever seen anywhere. Thank you!
Analesa, I would highly recommend Guy’s Astronomical Companion. It’s filled with large, very well thought-out and well executed illustrations showing successively larger spheres of cosmic space, starting with the Moon’s orbit around the Earth, and taking steps outward to show the solar system, our immediate stellar neighborhood, the Milky Way galaxy, our local group of galaxies, and on outward to the entire observable universe. Starting on page one and continuing throughout the book, Guy relates what we see in the sky to how things are arranged in and moving through space.
When I got serious about skywatching and astronomy almost 20 years ago, I wanted to understand where the stars I saw in the sky are in three-dimensional space. Thanks largely to the Astronomical Companion, now when I look up, I have a mental picture of the stars in 3-D, and I feel much more at home in the Milky Way.