Northern Taurids

Watch the season. The window runs 20 October – 10 December — 52 days — and the tabulated ZHR is 5, so the difference between the peak night and an ordinary night inside the window is small in absolute terms. What makes a Northern Taurid night good or bad is almost entirely the Moon and the cloud, both of which vary far more across the window than the shower's own activity does.

The Leonids carry a higher ZHR (12.5 against 5) and arrive at 70.3 km/s against 28.2 km/s here. But the two peaks fall within about a week of each other and both radiants are well placed from mid-northern latitudes, so in practice the deciding factor is which peak lands nearer a dark Moon in that particular year. The site's calendar page sorts exactly that comparison for you year by year.

Yes. The radiant is at declination +22.8°, so it reaches 33° from Sydney and 44° from São Paulo. That is a real, if reduced, view — unlike the Perseids or Quadrantids, which never rise from those latitudes at all.

Of 2026 to 2030: 2026 and 2028 are dark at the peak instant, 2027 and 2030 are heavily moonlit. With a 52-day window, a moonlit peak is a reason to shift your night rather than to skip the shower.

Because they are tabulated separately in the IAU Meteor Data Center with distinct radiants, drifts and velocities, and this site does not merge source records. The Northern branch sits at right ascension 58.9° and declination +22.8°; the Southern branch is roughly 6° west and 9° south. Merging them would produce a rate that matches neither published solution.

Judged only on how much of the Moon is lit at the peak instant: 2026 — 12 November 2026 (Moon 11% lit); 2027 — 13 November 2027 (Moon 98% lit); 2028 — 12 November 2028 (Moon 24% lit); 2029 — 12 November 2029 (Moon 45% lit); 2030 — 12 November 2030 (Moon 94% lit). The dark-Moon years are 2026 and 2028; the washed-out ones are 2027 and 2030. Moon illumination is the only one of the four factors that is knowable years ahead — cloud cover is not, and neither is whether you will be somewhere dark.

Because 5 is the zenithal hourly rate: what one observer would count under a magnitude 6.5 sky with the radiant straight overhead. Two corrections pull it down before you ever look up. Rate scales with the sine of the radiant altitude, so a radiant 30° up delivers half of what it delivers at the zenith. And the population index for this shower is r = 2.3, which means each magnitude of sky brightness you lose costs you a factor of 2.3 in the count. A suburban sky two magnitudes shallower than the reference therefore divides the rate by about 5.3. Real counts are typically 30–50% under the modelled figure even after those corrections.