One of autumn’s best opportunities to see brilliant “fireballs” arrives overnight Wednesday and Thursday (Nov. 4-5) during the Southern Taurid meteor shower.
Although the Southern Taurids are a minor meteor shower that produces only a handful of “shooting stars” each hour, it occasionally features exceptionally bright meteors called fireballs, which can briefly light up the night sky. According to NASA, fireballs are meteors at least as bright as Venus.
The Southern Taurids are active for several weeks in fall and peak Oct. 14, but the American Meteor Society expects the “fireball swarm component” to peak around Nov. 4-5.
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Meteors can streak across any part of the sky, but for this meteor shower, they appear to radiate from the constellation Taurus, which will rise in the eastern sky as night falls and climb higher as the night progresses. That makes the hours around midnight a good time to look for shooting stars. However, unlike major meteor showers such as the Perseids (which peak Aug. 12-13) and the Geminids (which peak Dec. 13-14), the Southern Taurids have a broad peak, so there’s no need to be outside at an exact time.
The Southern Taurids are the first of two fireball-rich meteor showers to be visible this month. The Northern Taurids will peak overnight on Nov. 11-12, giving stargazers another chance to spot a fireball. Both meteor showers result from dust and debris left in the inner solar system by Comet 2P/Encke striking Earth’s atmosphere.
Discovered in 1786, Encke is a massive comet, measuring 2.98 miles (4.8 kilometers) in diameter, according to NASA — around one-third the size of the object thought to have killed the nonavian dinosaurs. Encke orbits the sun every 3.3 years, one of the shortest known orbital periods of any comet in the solar system. Scientists theorize that Encke is one of many fragments of a giant comet that broke apart 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.
After the Southern and Northern Taurids, the next meteor shower will be the Leonids, which peak Nov. 17-18 and produce around 15 shooting stars per hour, and the Geminids, which peak Dec. 13-14 and can deliver up to 120 shooting stars per hour close to the peak.
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It’s best to watch meteor showers with the naked eye, but a good backyard telescope will serve you well in the months to come. As the long nights of winter kick off in the Northern Hemisphere, skywatching opportunities abound — including four consecutive supermoons from Nov. 2026 to Feb. 2027.
