Southern Taurids

Not as a target in its own right, but the Southern Taurids are worth knowing about for two reasons that the rate figure hides. The activity window is 72 days — 10 September – 20 November — the longest of the twelve showers here, so Taurid meteors are a background presence through most of autumn. And at 27.4 km/s they are slow and often bright, which makes the ones you do see memorable rather than marginal.

For deciding whether to go outside, not much. The two radiants are 6° apart in right ascension and 9° in declination, and their windows overlap through most of October and November, so on a given night you are usually seeing both. For counting them properly, the split matters: they are tabulated separately with ZHR 7 and 5, and the site models each one against your latitude rather than merging them.

It can. The verdict on this site reports the strongest shower for your coordinates on the night, and lists the others that are active. In late October and early November both Taurid branches, the Orionids and eventually the Leonids can all be active at once. On paper that is a Southern Taurid ZHR of 7 alongside 5 for the Northern Taurids, 20 for the Orionids and 12.5 for the Leonids — four separate lines, none of them impressive on its own. The combined rate is higher than any single line in the table, which is one reason the autumn months are worth watching even when no single shower is peaking. Note that the site does not add those rates together into one headline number: each is a zenithal rate for its own radiant, and the radiants are not at the same altitude at the same hour.

Of 2026 to 2030: 2026 and 2029. Because the window is 72 days long, a moonlit peak matters less here than for any other shower on the site — the Moon cycles through more than two full lunations inside a single Taurid season.

At 27.4 km/s these are the second-slowest meteors in this set after the Draconids, and the population index of 2.3 is on the bright-rich side, meaning the stream carries proportionally more bright meteors than a faint-rich shower like the delta-Aquariids at 3.2. A low hourly rate made of bright, slow meteors is a different proposition from a low rate made of faint fast ones. The number in the verdict does not capture that; this answer is the caveat to it.

Judged only on how much of the Moon is lit at the peak instant: 2026 — 5 November 2026 (Moon 12% lit); 2027 — 6 November 2027 (Moon 47% lit); 2028 — 5 November 2028 (Moon 92% lit); 2029 — 5 November 2029 (Moon 1% lit); 2030 — 5 November 2030 (Moon 83% lit). The dark-Moon years are 2026 and 2029; the washed-out ones are 2028 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 7 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.