The First Meteor Shower of Spring Peaks Tonight. Here's How to See It.
The weather has started to turn
The weather has started to turn and you finally won't be miserable while sitting outside late into the night. The timing is perfect for the return of stunning meteor showers. We haven't had a significant meteor shower rain down beautiful streaks of light since January. That, however, will change this week with the Lyrid meteor shower.
The Lyrid meteor shower will peak overnight between Tuesday, April 21, and Wednesday, April 22, resulting in dazzling meteors zipping across the night sky. It's not as bombastic as the Perseid meteor shower, which puts on one of the best shows almost every year, but the Lyrids will still be a beautiful show on a night when Venus is shining bright in the western sky. The meteors produced by the shower are fast, but Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office tells Thrillist that it also often produces fireballs, which are brilliantly bright meteors.
How to See the Lyrid Meteor Shower
More specifically, the shower will hit its peak in the predawn hours of April 22. Cooke says to expect to see around 15 meteors per hour. If you've got clear skies, you should be able to see them well. There will be an almost new moon in the sky, so its light won't interfere with your viewing as it did during almost every meteor shower in 2019.
If you're looking for the Lyrids from inside a city, you're probably not going to see much, if anything. You really need to get away from city lights and under dark skies, if you want to see the shower. That can be a little trickier than usual with the recommended social distancing, but it shouldn't be too hard to maintain a safe distance once you're somewhere dark enough to observe the meteors.
Once you've found your spot, look to the southwest early in the night or almost directly overhead closer to the morning. You're looking for the constellation Lyra (Lyrids!) and the star Vega. That's the radiant or the point from which the meteors appear to emanate. However, you shouldn't just stare at the radiant. That's the case with any meteor shower, but the Lyrids often produce fast-moving meteors, and they'll be moving away from the radiant.
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