Happy new year! The Quadrantid meteor shower switches on the lights for the year, and we hope that the world stage will be brighter than it was in 2024. (How’s that for a strained attempt to extract a moral from an astronomical event that is really just a stream of dust.)
The after-midnight hours of January 3 and 4 are the likeliest time to notice Quadrantid “shooting stars,” though outlying members of the stream may be in the sky any time from about December 28 to January 12.
Here is one of the set of four illustrations about the Quadrantids from page 133 of Astronomical Calendar 2025. This is the horizon scene for an American location as the radiant of these meteors comes into view. As the night goes on and the radiant climbs, more of the meteor trails will be above the horizon.
The radiant is the small area from which the meteors appear to fly out. If you see in any part of the sky an incandescent back to that area, it is not a random bit of space dust but a Quadrantid, a particle that once separated from the parent comet (though there is some uncertainty as to what that comet was).
The name of this shower is the exception to the general rule that a shower gets its name from the constellation where its radiant is. There was once, in this area near the end of the Big Dipper, a constellation that, like some others of relatively recent invention, was named for an astronomical instrument: Quadrans Muralis, the “wall quadrant.” The constellation and the instrument fell into disuse; the shower preserves the name, as if in a museum.
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