If you’re stargazing late on Dec. 21 and 22, keep your eyes peeled for “shooting stars” during the peak of the annual Uruid meteor shower.
The Ursa Minor meteor shower will be active from December 13th to December 26th, with its nighttime peak coinciding with the winter solstice on December 21st at 10:03 a.m. ET. Although the two events are completely unrelated, this is the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere and is a great time to hunt for and photograph meteors if you’re up for the challenge.
The Ursa Minor meteor shower is not one of the major meteor showers of the year and is often overlooked as Christmas approaches. But there’s good reason to watch them this year.
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This year’s Uruid meteor shower will occur right after the new moon. At this time, our natural satellite is between the Earth and the sun and is not present in the night sky. So this meteor shower should benefit from deep darkness. The new moon will occur on December 19th at 8:43 PM ET, and on December 21st it will be barely visible as a 2% bright crescent moon after sunset. “Shooting stars” are fast and often dark, so a dark sky increases your chances of seeing these meteors.
The Ursa Minor meteor shower typically produces about 5 to 10 shooting stars per hour, according to the American Meteor Society. However, explosions have been recorded in the past when the number of meteors exceeded 25 per hour. According to EarthSky, explosions of about 100 meteors per hour occurred in 1945 and 1986.
You can look for urids all night long, but the best time is likely to be before dawn on Monday, December 22nd. That said, the shower’s radiant point (from which it appears to originate) is the bright star Kochab in the constellation Ursa Minor, which will be highest in the northern sky by then. The constellation Urus is not visible from most parts of the Southern Hemisphere.
The Uruid meteor shower is caused by dust and debris left in the inner solar system by Comet Tuttle, which orbits the sun every 13.5 years.
The next meteor shower is the Squirrelids, which is another meteor shower that is often overlooked. It will peak on the night of January 2nd and 3rd, 2026, when about 120 meteors per hour will collide with the bright light of January’s full Wolf Moon.
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