Meteor showers from Hawaiʻi

The next twelve months

Peaks are computed from where Earth sits in its orbit, not looked up in a table, so these dates are exact for the year shown rather than the usual approximate ones. Radiant height is the highest that shower's radiant gets while the sky is properly dark, from the Maunakea Visitor Station.

Moon percentage is illumination on the peak night. Above about 60% you will only see the brightest fireballs. We do not print an expected hourly rate: the published ZHR figures assume a perfect sky and a radiant directly overhead, and quoting them as a promise is how people end up disappointed on a good night.

Why the famous ones are not always the good ones here

A meteor shower's rate depends on how high its radiant sits above your horizon. Almost every shower calendar you will find is written for around 40°N, and Hawaiʻi is at 19.8°N, which reshuffles the list in both directions.

The Quadrantids are the clearest example. They are one of the strongest showers on paper, but their radiant sits at declination +50°, so from here it never gets far above the horizon and most of the meteors happen below your line of sight.

The Eta Aquariids go the other way. Their radiant sits almost exactly on the celestial equator, which makes them a mediocre northern shower and a genuinely good one here. They are pre-dawn, which is why they get skipped: the radiant does not clear the horizon until the small hours.

That is the pattern worth remembering. From this latitude the southern-radiant showers are better than their reputation, the far-northern ones are worse, and the pre-dawn ones are worth the alarm clock.

Watching one properly

• Go after the radiant has climbed, which for most showers means after midnight and often nearer dawn. The table above gives the height; earlier than that you are watching the ground.
• Do not look at the radiant. Meteors streak away from it, so they are longest and easiest to catch 40 or 50 degrees off to one side.
• Lie down, or bring a reclining chair. This sounds like a small thing and it is not: an hour of standing with your head tilted back ends the session early, and the whole sky matters, not one patch of it.
• Give it at least an hour. Rates come in clumps, and ten quiet minutes says nothing about the night.
• No telescope, no binoculars. They narrow your view to the one part of the sky the meteor is not in.