The Year's Best and Brightest Meteor Shower Peaks This Weekend. Here's How to Watch the Radiant Geminids

A waning crescent moon should make for a fairly dark sky, allowing viewers to see up to 150 shooting stars per hour

Skywatchers, rejoice. It’s once again time to watch what is often considered the best and brightest meteor shower of the year.

The Geminids will peak this weekend—from the night of December 13 into the morning of December 14—lighting up our skies with colorful, glowing streaks. If conditions are just right, you can spot up to 150 meteors per hour, according to the American Meteor Society.

The best strategy to see these fast, typically yellow “shooting stars” is to find a dark location free of light pollution and eye the sky from around 10 p.m. until dawn, per NASA. Give your eyes about 30 minutes to adjust to the darkness and avoid looking at your phone. Spotting meteors can be a waiting game, so make sure to stay patient and wrap yourself in proper winter gear.

The meteors should soon stand out, streaking across the sky at 21 miles per second.

“The other stars are going to be all stationary, so you’ll see this moving across the sky, and it’ll leave a little tail behind it,” says Bethany Cobb Kung, an astronomer at George Washington University, to Adithi Ramakrishnan at the Associated Press.

Although the meteors look like they originate from the constellation Gemini—a location called a “radiant”—your best bet is to not look directly toward that smattering of stars, but 45 degrees away from it, per the Planetary Society.

Additionally, the moon will be a waning crescent that night, only around 30 percent full. Keep in mind that moonrise will be around 2 a.m. local time, which could interfere a bit with your viewing party.

“Potential observers have the choice to observe prior to moonrise or to look toward the west with the moon at their back after 2 a.m.,” says Robert Lunsford, the journal editor of the American Meteor Society, to Stefanie Waldek at National Geographic. “Since the strongest rates occur near 2 a.m., most people will face eastward before that time, then swing around to the west after it to avoid having the moonlight affect their night vision.”

The Geminids are special for more than just providing a spectacular light show. While most meteor showers originate from comets—icy objects that formed beyond the solar system—this event comes from what researchers think is an asteroid, a rock born within the sun’s domain. Specifically, the Geminids occur when Earth passes through the trail of asteroid 3200 Phaethon, which was discovered in 1983.

The asteroid trail contains bigger, harder chunks than what’s in the tail of a comet, National Geographic reports. “This material is larger, on average, and survives further into our atmosphere and tends to produce brighter meteors,” Lunsford tells the outlet. “When these metals are heated during the passage through our atmosphere, they produce colors associated with each type of metal.” For example, yellow comes from iron and sodium; blue comes from magnesium; and orange comes from calcium and silicon.  

However, Phaethon displays characteristics of both comets and asteroids, leaving scientists stumped. Some astronomers suspect it could be a “dead comet”—one whose ice has melted—or even a new type of object called a “rock comet,” according to NASA.

The Japanese spacecraft DESTINY+ is set to study the odd asteroid in the next few years, which should give scientists more information about this mysterious object.

If you can’t venture outside this weekend, don’t worry. The Geminids will grace our skies again next December, and there are plenty of meteor showers to come. The earliest will be the Ursids, which will peak just before Christmas.