21-04-2025
- Science
- San Francisco Chronicle
Want to see the Lyrid meteor shower? Here's how to have the best chance in the Bay Area
The Lyrid meteor shower peaks Monday night, providing Bay Area stargazers with an opportunity to spot meteors.
Local weather conditions should generally cooperate, though coastal areas are more likely to be foggy. There may be a few passing high clouds along the bay shoreline and inland, but Chronicle meteorologists expect conditions to be clear before midnight.
The moon also shouldn't be a problem, as it was in previous years.
'The light from the crescent moon will not interfere too much with the viewing, but it is best to look away from the moon, preferably placing it behind you,' said Bill Cooke, who leads NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center, in a statement.
The best time for meteor showers is generally between midnight and dawn, said Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomy professor at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco. Experts recommend that Bay Area residents seek out the darkest locations they can and give their eyes time to adjust to the darkness. And, importantly, be patient.
'It's not like fireworks,' Fraknoi said.
The Lyrid meteor shower occurs every year, when the Earth passes through debris left in the wake of Comet Thatcher. The comet's orbit around the sun takes just over four centuries to complete. While the peak of the event is Monday night, meteors will be visible through April 26.
Comets are mostly made up of ice, but they also contain dust and rocky material.
'It's really cosmic dirt,' Fraknoi said. 'These are leftover chunks from the beginning of the solar system.'
As comets travel closer to the sun, ice vaporizes and debris is left behind. When Earth's orbit passes through the trail of cosmic dirt, particles fly through the planet's atmosphere and burn up.
'You see a streak of light,' said Gerald McKeegan, an adjunct astronomer at Chabot Space & Science Center. 'That is a meteor.'
The Lyrid meteor shower doesn't tend to produce long, glowing trains as meteors streak through the night sky. But meteors can produce occasional bright flashes.
Unlike the Perseids or the Geminids, 'this is kind of a modest meteor shower,' McKeegan said. 'You're only going to see 15 or 20 meteors in the course of an hour, and that's only if you're in a dark sky location.'
That figure is based on rates during peaks of Lyrid meteor showers in previous years. Some years, however, the Lyrid has surprised watchers with as many as 100 meteors per hour.
The Lyrid meteor shower is so named because meteors appear to originate from the vicinity of the constellation Lyra. But meteors can appear anywhere in the night sky.
'The more of the sky you can scan, the more likely you'll be to actually see a meteor,' Fraknoi said.
