Meteor Shower Makes Star-Gazing Easy This Weekend

The Lyrids meteor shower is happening now, and will continue through Friday, April 26, peaking in the predawn hours of Sunday and Monday. 

According to Weather.com, Summerville has some rain in the forecast Saturday, but Sunday and Monday should have partly cloudy skies, offering an opportunity to see the shower. 

This is the first major meteor shower since January.

Watch a video of the 2012 Lyrids shower attached to this story.

While the Lyrids average 10 to 20 meteors an hour, AccuWeather's Mark Paquette said there is potential for significantly more.

"It is unpredictable," Paquette said. "Sometimes Lyrids have 'surges' which can break up the rate to near 100 per hour."

Paquette explained that the Lyrids, named for their location in the constellation Lyra, are the debris of Comet Thatcher tail when Earth's path crosses through it. The meteors are bits of the tail's comet, usually no bigger than grains of sand, that strike the atmosphere at 49 kilometers a second. As they travel through our atmosphere, they disintegrate as streaks of light, possibly casting a shadow before leaving behind smoke-like trail of debris.

"Lyrid meteors are typically as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper, which is to say, middling brightness, but some are more intense, even brighter than Venus," Paquette said.

The "Lyrid fireballs" originate in the sky near the star Vega, Lyra's brightest star. Predawn hours offer the best view of the meteors as Vega sits nearly overhead. In the evenings the shower sits closer to the horizon, blocking many of them from view. The waxing moon will also light up the sky until after midnight, dimming the sight of the meteors. However, the moon sets before dawn, so its brightness will not hinder the view of the shower when it moves into its peak positional hours.