As the weather warms up, late April’s Lyrid meteor shower light show offers many people the chance to dust off their stargazing rugs (not to mention their favorite hot drink containers) and get back to looking up at the 2024 night sky. The total solar eclipse earlier this month sparked new interest in the celestial sphere, which may have also sparked interest in the Lyrid meteor shower.
But she, who is about to be one month old, has other plans. Its brightness will not be optimal. However, that doesn’t necessarily kill the opportunity entirely.
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When to Watch the Lyrid Meteor Shower in 2024
Either stay up late on the night of April 21 or wake up before dawn on April 22, as peak activity is expected to be at 5:23 a.m. ET. Peak activity times are really where you should focus your efforts, because the Lyrids come fast and furious in a compressed time window—sometimes seeing 100 meteors per hour. You don’t really get the flexibility you get with longer meteor showers like the Perseids that last for weeks. On the plus side, the concentrated intensity of the Lyrids may include fireballs, according to the American Meteor Society.
How to see the Lyrid meteor shower when the moon is bright?
Before the full moon arrives on April 23, a bright first quarter gibbous moon will undoubtedly make it more difficult for you to observe meteors. That doesn’t mean there’s no shower in sight, but it does mean the extra effort will pay off. For example, getting a great view of a meteor shower usually requires you to stay about forty miles away from the nearest city to minimize light pollution. This is especially true under lunar conditions.
So the moon will be an exciting topic, and it’s not always possible to drive out into nature, but think of it this way: when visibility is ideal, you can usually see four to eight an hour, even without a meteor shower meteor. This means that during the Lyrid meteor shower, even if you just watch the sky in a suburb for an hour and catch a glimpse of ten meteors, you’ll be looking at a pretty good show overall.
Mix and match speed of light
Oh, and your night vision will be better if you don’t let your eyes adjust to the glowing screen, so keep your phone in your pocket.
What exactly is the Lyrid meteor shower?
Most meteor showers are caused by debris left behind by comets orbiting the sun, and the Lyrids are no exception. They are a trail of dust left behind by Comet Thatcher, last seen in 1861 (it will not appear until 2278). As our orbit takes us across the trail each year, the result is a fireworks display as chunks the size of rice grains burn up in our atmosphere.
Meteors streak across the sky, but if you can’t see what they’re doing, looking for them can help radiant point, where glowing meteors can be seen in the sky. We often plot radiants by stars or constellations where they overlap, which can create the false impression that meteors are coming from many light-years away, when in fact they are on a collision course with our planet. In North America, the Lyrid meteor shower’s radiant more or less overlaps with the star Vega in the constellation Lyra, which will rise a little before midnight and reach its highest point just before dawn.
So be patient, grab a hot drink, and if you feel completely lost, the stargazing app will direct your attention to the radiant. But given the brightness of the moon, the problem may not be your sense of direction. This year may not be a good time to view the Lyrid meteor shower.