Are there clear skies in your forecast overnight tonight? If so, you may want to stay up extra late or get up extra early Friday morning for a chance to see the best meteor shower of winter and the last one for months to come.
At the start of each year, within a few days of all the New Year’s Eve celebrations wrapping up, the sky itself puts on a grand show for us, sending streaks of light flashing over our heads throughout the night. This annual display is known as the Quadrantid meteor shower.
Although this meteor shower is active from December 26 through January 12, the best time to watch is during the peak — one specific night, roughly halfway through, when it produces the greatest number of meteors. In 2025, this ‘peak’ for the Quadrantids occurs on the night of Thursday, January 2. The best time to see them, however, is in the early, pre-dawn hours on Friday, January 3.
The radiant of the Quadrantid meteor shower, located in the northeast sky, at 3 a.m. local time on January 3, 2025. (Stellarium/Scott Sutherland)
At their peak, the Quadrantids can deliver up to 120 meteors per hour, or roughly 2 every minute throughout the night. However, because these meteors can show up at any point throughout the sky above, and we can only focus on a relatively smaller portion of the sky at any one time, the average observer tends to spot about half that number. That’s still around 1 every minute, which is exceptionally good for a meteor shower!
As a bonus, this year, the Quadrantids are timed almost perfectly to put on a great show.
With the New Moon occurring only a few days ago — a rare “Black Moon” for some) — there will only be a thin crescent Moon in the sky tonight. After that dips below the horizon, within just a few hours of sunset, we will be left with a dark, moonless sky for the rest of the night.
This is the perfect arrangement for meteor shower watching, so check your weather forecast for clear skies and get out from under the urban light pollution domes of our cities, for a chance to experience the full wonder of this celestial event.
READ MORE: How to get the most out of meteor showers and other night sky events
Clear or cloudy skies?
The one unfortunate part of the Quadrantid meteor shower timing is that it takes place in early January, when Canada tends to see more cloud cover. This year appears to be no exception to that, as the map below reveals.
The best locations from which to watch the Quadrantids tonight will be across central and northern Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and from north of Lake Huron into eastern Ontario. The northern territories may have the best view of all!
For those regions under the most cloud, check your local forecast to see if your skies are expected to be completely overcast, or if there will be clear breaks throughout the night. Additionally, lake effect bands across southwestern and central Ontario will blot out the sky for many observers in those regions. However, the exact extent of the bands, as well as their exact angle, will determine who has a view of the sky and who does not.
What’s going on here?
Meteors are produced by small bits of rock, dust, or ice that are swept up by Earth’s atmosphere from space.
When these tiny meteoroids hit the top of the atmosphere, they are typically travelling at speeds of tens of thousands of kilometres per hour. At that velocity, they compress the air in their path so tightly that it causes the atoms and molecules in the air to glow, producing a flash of light that we see in the night sky, known as a meteor. Slightly larger meteoroids, from the size of a grain of sand up to a softball, result in much brighter, longer lasting meteors known as fireballs. An even larger object, up to a metre or more in size, will often produce a bolide — a fireball that explodes high up in the air, briefly lighting up the entire sky as if it was daytime.
The pressure of the air pushing back on them, along with the heat produced during the meteor flash, typically vapourizes smaller meteoroids. However, larger, slower meteoroids can survive their passage through the air, falling to the ground as meteorites.
On any particular night of the year, it’s possible to see a few random meteors streak by overhead. Scientists refer to these as sporadics. These are simply random bits of solar system debris intercepted by our planet, which are part of the several metric tons of space dust that NASA estimates is swept up by Earth every day.
At certain times of the year, though, we see more concentrated bursts of meteor activity. Each results from our planet passing through one of dozens of streams of debris that are left behind by comets and asteroids as they orbit the Sun. Because they all originate from the same stream, the meteors produced during each of these events all appear to originate from the same spot in the sky, known as the radiant, and we call these events meteor showers.
There are a dozen meteor showers every year that are active and consistent enough for the public to enjoy — two in spring, two in summer, six in the fall, and another two in winter.
Each follows roughly the same pattern. The shower starts off with just a few meteors per night as Earth first slips into their stream of debris. It then ramps up over days or weeks until the number of meteors peaks at the most concentrated part of the stream. After that, the shower tapers off until Earth exits the stream. However, they all begin, peak, and end at different times, and they also vary in strength.
Weak meteor showers, like the Draconids or the Ursids, can produce up to 10 meteors per hour during their peak. Moderate ones, like the eta Aquariids or the Orionids max out at anywhere from 20 to 50 meteors every hour. Strong ones, like the Quadrantids, the Perseids, and the Geminids can deliver up to or even over 100 per hour at their peak.
Each meteor shower is also named for the constellation closest to its radiant. In this case, the Quadrantids are named after a now-unused constellation called Quadrans Muralis. However, its radiant can be found in the northern sky, in between the modern constellations of Boötes, Draco, and Hercules.
The Quadrantids radiant is shown in this simulation of the night sky, nestled among the northern constellations. (Stellarium)
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A meteor shower ‘oddball’
Most meteor showers are produced by comets. As these “giant dirty snowballs” get close to the Sun, the heat causes them to shed ice and dust, which is left behind to form a trail that follows a similar path through space. We — specifically our planet — then fly through that trail of ice and dust each year as we orbit the Sun. Astronomers have associated a number of the annual meteor showers we see to specific comets. They accomplished this by tracing back the path the meteors took as they plunged into Earth’s atmosphere, found their orbit around the Sun from that trajectory, and compared that to the orbits of known objects in our solar system.
For the Quadrantids, though, the object found that most closely matched the meteoroids’ orbit was 2003 EH1.
The Quadrantid meteoroid stream and orbit of asteroid 2003 EH1, along the positions of the inner planets on January 3, 2025. (meteorshowers.org)
However, 2003 EH1 is not a comet. Instead, it appears to be a rocky asteroid.
There’s some speculation that 2003 EH1 may be what’s known as an “extinct comet” — a comet that has made so many trips around the Sun that all of its ice is now gone. The only thing left behind is the largest rocky bit, which may have acted as the initial nucleus of the comet, when it formed billions of years ago.