☄️ Meteor showers — and how they fare from here

What is a meteor shower?

A comet (or a crumbling asteroid) leaves a trail of grit strung along its orbit. Once or twice each year the Earth ploughs through one of these trails — on the same dates every year, because we cross the same point in our orbit — and for a few nights the sky fills with "shooting stars."

Almost every one is tiny: a grain of sand to a pea, hitting the air at up to 70 km per second and burning up in a streak about 100 km overhead. Nothing reaches the ground. The dust is old — the Orionids and Eta Aquariids are both debris shed by Halley's Comet on passes centuries ago.

Why they seem to come from one point — the "radiant"

All the grains in a trail move in parallel. But perspective makes parallel lines appear to spread from a single vanishing point — like railway tracks converging in the distance, or snow rushing at a car's windscreen. That point is the shower's radiant, and it's how showers get their names: the Perseids radiate from Perseus, the Geminids from Gemini.

You don't look at the radiant — meteors near it are foreshortened to short streaks. Look about two-thirds of the way up, 40–60° to the side of it, where they flare longest. Trace any meteor backwards: if the line hits the radiant, it belongs to the shower; if not, it's a random "sporadic."

Why after midnight is better

Before midnight you're on the trailing side of the Earth — meteors have to catch up to you. After midnight you rotate onto the leading side, driving head-on into the stream, so you sweep up more of them and they arrive faster and brighter. The pre-dawn hours are almost always the best, and the radiant is usually higher then too.

Singapore's twist: some showers win, some lose

The number you actually see falls off with the radiant's height — roughly as its sine. A radiant sitting at 30° up delivers about half its overhead rate; at 15°, only a quarter. From our near-equatorial latitude, far-northern radiants stay low — so the world-famous Perseids and Quadrantids underperform here, and the Ursids barely clear the horizon.

But the equator has its reward: the showers whose radiants ride high in our pre-dawn sky. The Orionids and Delta Aquariids climb to around 70° here; the Geminids — the year's richest — ride high too; and even the Eta Aquariids (Halley's other shower), still rising as dawn breaks, are seen far better from our low latitude than from Europe or North America. Here's how the year's showers actually fare in Singapore's small hours — soonest first:

How to watch — no telescope needed

• Use just your eyes. A telescope's tiny field is the worst possible tool — meteors flash across the whole sky. Lie back and take in as much sky as you can.
• Give your eyes 20–30 minutes to adapt to the dark, and keep phone screens off — one glance resets you.
• Look about two-thirds of the way up, off to the side of the radiant, and away from the Moon and the worst of the city glow.
• Be patient. Even a good shower means one every few minutes, in bursts — not a constant rain. Give it an hour.
• The Moon is the biggest spoiler. A bright Moon can erase all but the brightest; the darkest showers are the ones peaking near New Moon.
• City reality: from Jurong you'll catch the bright ones, not the faint majority — but a brilliant fireball cuts through anything.