Look to the north in the evening sky on October 8 and 9, and you might glimpse several slivers of light shooting across the starry expanse, emanating from the constellation Draco. Around this time each year, Earth passes through a region of space strewn with cosmic debris, chunks of ice and rock, which upon entering our atmosphere burn up, sometimes resulting in spectacular “shooting stars.”
This is also called a meteor shower.
How to Catch the Draconid Show
The best time to glimpse them is when the shower’s radiant (the point in space where the meteors appear to emanate from) approaches its highest point in the sky (its upper transit). Later, as the radiant falls, the meteor shower will diminish in its intensity. The constellation Draco can be found in between the Little and Big Dippers in the north-northwesterly direction, snaking overhead into the night sky. The Draconids’ radiant is found in between the “eyes of the dragon”—the stars Rastaban and Eltanin—but one need not look precisely there to find meteors; they emanate from that point, but they may appear anywhere across the sky.
The Draconids are expected to peak on October 8 in the Americas. Observers in the Northern Hemisphere may spot the meteor shower in the early evening when Draco reaches its upper transit. This year’s light show isn’t anticipated to yield much—perhaps 10 to 20 meteors per hour, according to NASA—but you never know with meteors.
Where Do They Come From Anyway?
The space debris where the Draconids originate from is, in fact, the scattered detritus of a small comet, just 1.24 miles (2 kilometers) in diameter, according to NASA. Comets themselves are simply amalgams of frozen gas and rock, constantly shedding their material as they travel through space, forming an expansive complex. The Draconids’ parent comet, 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, was named after two of its discoverers: Michel Giacobini, who spotted it on December 20, 1900; and Ernst Zinner, who found it again on October 23, 1913. One of several comets in the Solar System, 21P/Giacobini-Zinner travels along an elliptical orbit around the sun, periodically approaching to about the same distance from the sun as Earth before hurtling outward again, reaching just past the orbit of Jupiter.
Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner orbits the sun every 6.6 years, resulting in periodic gluts of meteoric activity as it arrives at its closest point to the sun—or perihelion—while discharging its material throughout the inner solar system. Remnants of that material persists every year, but if Earth happens to pass through when the comet is nearby, at its perihelion, it can cause high-yield Draconid meteor storms with hundreds or even thousands of meteors per hour. Historically, in the years 1933 and 1946, the Draconids resulted in meteor storms in which several thousand meteors per hour occurred; while the years 1985, 1998, and 2018 saw increased counts of meteors but did not yield storms.
The bottom line? The Draconids this year might not be a showstopper, though the full hunter’s moon might be worth watching. The diehard meteor spotter, nevertheless, might be wise to look northward in the early evening on October 8 and 9. And maybe, just maybe, they might get to make a wish upon a shooting star.
