How to See the Leonids Meteor Shower in the Bay Area This Weekend

The annual Leonids meteor shower will reach peak activity on the morning of Nov. 18 this year, when it is expected to produce 10-15 meteors per hour under good weather conditions and dark skies.

If you want to see them, target your viewing hours anytime from midnight to dawn on Saturday morning — though meteor activity may increase as the morning hours grow later.

How to watch, what to look for

The key to a good meteor viewing experience is timing and location. Timing-wise, the best hours are after midnight, in the early morning, between 2–4 a.m.

As for location, your two watchwords should be safe and dark, as far from sources of urban light pollution as possible.

A clear view of the eastern sky, without obstructions like trees, hills or buildings, is also important. The sky is the canvas on which the meteor shower paints its luminous streaks, so like any art gallery experience, there should be nothing blocking your line of sight to this work of art.

The Leonids’ “radiant” point — the spot in the sky the meteors appear to streak from — is in the constellation Leo, the Lion, recognizable by the backward question mark formed by some of its stars. The bright star Regulus punctuates the dot of the question mark.

Leo rises on the eastern horizon around midnight and spends the rest of the morning climbing higher into the sky. By dawn, it is high above the southeastern horizon.

Get comfortable. Bring a chair or a blanket to roll out on the ground. Meteor hunting takes patience, and you’ll have the best experience if you spend at least an hour, preferably more, under the stars. Gaze eastward, taking in as much of the sky as you can. Though meteors will appear to streak from Leo, they can appear anywhere in the sky anytime.

Dark skies

Though we live in a sprawling metropolitan area and the skies are inundated by urban light pollution, there are plenty of spots fringing the Bay Area where the sky is partially shielded and relatively darker — or, at least, less bright — conditions can be found. In the South Bay, Henry Coe State Park is a good location. There are some roadside opportunities on the peninsula east of Skyline Blvd. In the East Bay, the Sunol area, Mount Diablo, the East Bay hills and Tilden Park are places to consider. And northward toward Sonoma and Napa counties provide plenty of rural back roads that offer dark promise.

Just check the weather to gauge how clouds or fog might impact viewing.

The good news is that the waxing crescent moon sets early, leaving meteor-watching hours unimpacted by moonlight.

What is a meteor shower?

A meteor, or “shooting star,” is a tiny speck of rock or metal that hits Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and burns up in a fiery flash. If you’ve watched a video of a spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere on its way home and falling in a bright streaking shroud, then you’ve seen the phenomenon that produces a meteor. In the case of the spacecraft, its speed is a mere few thousand miles per hour, while a typical meteor hits the atmosphere, moving tens of miles per second, making it fall fast and furious.

A meteor shower happens when the Earth moves through a trail of dust left behind by a comet sometime in the past. A comet is like a big, dirty snowball, and when it gets close to the sun, some of its ice is heated and evaporates, carrying into space dust that scatters in the comet’s trail.

The Earth itself moves around the sun at a speed of 18 miles per second, and when combined with the orbital velocity of the dust stream, meteor entry speeds can reach 20 or 30 miles per second. The result here on the ground is a meteor shower, with individual meteors appearing to fall from the direction the Earth is moving through space — the shower’s radiant point. This is why we typically only see a meteor shower in the morning hours when our location is on the side of the Earth moving forward into the dust stream.

Meteors you see burn up high in the atmosphere, at altitudes of 40 to 50 miles.

Cometary Origin

The comet that left behind the stream of dust that is the source of Leonids meteors is called 55/Temple-Tuttle. Temple-Tuttle orbits the sun once every 33 years and was last seen in our part of the solar system back in 1998. The comet will return in 2031, adding more dust to its orbital trail and potentially boosting future Leonids activity.

In fact, the Leonids have been known to produce meteor storms following the close passage of Temple-Tuttle. In 1966, Leonids fell at a breathtaking rate of thousands of meteors per minute for some observers. Following its 1998 passage, Leonids’ activity increased impressively over the next two or three years — though nothing like the storm of 1966.