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The Perseid meteor shower reached its 2026 peak across the night of 12-13 August, with the maximum predicted for 14:53 UTC on 13 August 2026.
The peak fell under a new moon, producing dark skies; observers at rural sites could expect roughly 30 to 50 meteors an hour and up to about 100 under ideal dark-sky conditions.
In India the best viewing window was between about 2:00 am and 4:30 am IST on 13 August, when the radiant stands high in the north-east.
The shower is produced by debris from Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle and appears to radiate from the constellation Perseus; it stays active from mid-July to 24 August.
The 2026 peak coincided with the total solar eclipse of 12 August - the first time in the 21st century that the two events have fallen together.
A meteoroid is a small rocky or metallic body travelling through space - for the Perseids, mostly dust-sized grains shed by Comet Swift-Tuttle. It becomes a meteor when it enters Earth's atmosphere and the streak of light appears, caused not by friction alone but by compression heating of the air ahead of it. If any part survives to reach the ground, that surviving fragment is a meteorite. Perseid particles are far too small to survive, so the shower produces no meteorites. The point in the sky from which the meteors appear to spread is the radiant, and it is a perspective effect - the particles actually travel on parallel paths.
Simple Analogy: Driving into falling snow, the flakes seem to stream outward from a point ahead of the windscreen even though they are all falling straight down. The radiant is that point, and Earth is the moving car.
| Shower | Approximate Peak | Parent Body |
|---|---|---|
| Quadrantids | Early January | Asteroid 2003 EH1 |
| Lyrids | Late April | Comet Thatcher |
| Eta Aquariids | Early May | Comet 1P/Halley |
| Perseids | Mid-August | Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle |
| Orionids | Late October | Comet 1P/Halley |
| Leonids | Mid-November | Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle |
| Geminids | Mid-December | Asteroid 3200 Phaethon |
General Awareness > General Science - Astronomy and Current Events
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General Awareness > General Science
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The point in the sky from which the meteors of a shower appear to diverge; the Perseids radiate from Perseus.
A body in space / the streak of light as it burns in the atmosphere / the fragment that survives to reach the ground.
The number of meteors an ideal observer would see per hour with the radiant overhead under perfectly dark skies; the Perseids' ZHR is around 100.