The Perseid Meteor Shower.

The Perseid Meteor Shower lasts from late July to early September each year, and are expected to be at a peak before dawn on Tuesday 12 August 2025. Viewing will be less than ideal for the Perseids this year, as the meteors peak after the Full Moon on Saturday 9 August. The Perseids get their name from the constellation of Perseus, in which the meteors have their radiant (the point from which they appear to originate). Potentially, at the peak of activity, the Perseid Meteor Shower can produce over 150 meteors per hour, although it is best seen from the Northern Hemisphere, as the constellation of Perseus is near to the North Pole. 

The radiant point for the Perseid Meteor Shower. N Sanu/Wikimedia Commons.

Meteor showers are thought to be largely composed of material from the tails of comets. Comets are composed largely of ice (mostly water and carbon dioxide), and when they fall into the inner Solar System the outer layers of this boil away, forming a visible tail (which always points away from the Sun, not in the direction the comet is coming from, as our Earth-bound experience would lead us to expect). Particles of rock and dust from within the comet are freed by this melting (strictly sublimation, transforming directly from a solid to a gas due to the low pressure on it's surface) of the comet into the tail and continue to orbit in the same path as the comet, falling behind over time.

The Earth passing through a stream of comet dust, resulting in a meteor shower. Not to scale. Astro Bob.

The Perseid Meteors are caused by the Earth passing through the trail of the Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, and encountering dust from the tail of this comet. The dust particles strike the atmosphere at speeds of over 200 000 km per hour, burning up in the upper atmosphere and producing a light show in the process.

How the passage of the Earth through a meteor shower creates a radiant point from which they can be observed. In The Sky.

Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle was discovered independently in July 1862 by the astronomers Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle, after whom it is named. The number 109P implies that it was the 109th comet discovered (strictly speaking people had been observing comets for thousands of years, but it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that it was realised that they were predictable objects that returned cyclically), that it is a periodic comet (P - again, most comets are periodic, but the term 'periodic comet' is reserved for those with periods of less than 200 years, since these can be reliably predicted).

Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle imaged in 1992 during its last visit to the Inner Solar System. The Planetary Society/NASA.

Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle itself only visits the Inner Solar System once every 133 years, last doing so in 1992, on an eccentric orbit tilted at 113° to the plane of the Solar System (or 67° with a retrograde orbit - an orbit in the opposite direction to the planets - depending on how you look at it), that takes it from 0.95 AU from the Sun (95% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 51.22 AU from the Sun (51.22 times as far from the Sun as the Earth, more than three times as far from the Sun as Neptune and slightly outside the Kuiper Belt, but only scraping the innermost zone of the Oort Cloud). 

The orbit and current position of Comet 109P/Swift Tuttle. JPL Small Body Database Browser.

109P/Swift-Tuttle is next expected to visit the Inner Solar System in 2126, reaching about 22 950 00 km (0.15 AU) from Earth in August of that year. As a comet with a period of more than 20 years but less than 200 years, 109P/Swift-Tuttle is considered to be a Periodic Comet, and a Halley-type Comet.

See also...

The Southern Delta Aquariid Meteor Shower.

The Southern Delta Aquariid Meteor Shower is visible between roughly 12 July and 23 August each year, and is expected to peak on 30 July this year, producing up to 25 meteors per hour. Best viewing this year is predicted to be between 2.00-3.00 am (this will be in local time wherever they are viewed from, as the time reflects the orientation of the planet to the rest of the Solar System) and dawn, when the radiant point of the shower (point from which the meteors appear to radiate), which is close to the star Delta Aquari (hence the name) will be highest in the sky. This year the peak of activity will fall slightly before the first quarter moon on 1 August, and the Moon will be in the constellation of Virgo, making it reasonably distant from Delta Aqaurius in the sky, and setting before midnight, so that it should not interfere with viewing of the peak of the meteor shower.

The radiant point of the Delta Aquariid Meteors. David Dickinson/Starry Night/Universe Today.

Meteor streams are thought to come from dust shed by comets as they come close to the Sun and their icy surfaces begin to evaporate away. Although the dust is separated from the comet, it continues to orbit the Sun on roughly the same orbital path, creating a visible meteor shower when the Earth crosses that path, and flecks of dust burn in the upper atmosphere, due to friction with the atmosphere.

The Earth passing through a stream of comet dust, resulting in a meteor shower. Not to scale. Astro Bob.

The Southern Delta Aquariids are thought to be caused by the Earth passing through the trail of Comet 96P/Machholz, where it encounters thousands of tiny dust particles shed from the comet as its icy surface is melted (strictly sublimated) by the heat of the Sun. 96P/Machholz is a short period, Jupiter Family Comet, crossing our orbit every 5.24 years, but the trail of particles shed by it forms a constant flow.

How the passage of the Earth through a meteor shower creates a radiant point from which they can be observed. In The Sky.

96P/Machholz was discovered by amateur astronomer Donald Machholz from Loma Peak in California; the name 96P/Machholz implies that it was discovered by Machholz and was the 96th periodic comet discovered (a periodic comet is a comet which orbits the Sun in less than 200 years). 

The orbit and current position of Comet 96P/Machholz. JPL Small Body Database.

96P/Machholz has an orbital period of 1929 days (5.28 years) and a highly eccentric orbit tilted at an angle of 58.5° to the plain of the Solar System, that brings it from 0.12 AU from the Sun at perihelion (12% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, considerably inside  the orbit of Mercury, and closer to the Sun than any other known periodic comet); to 5.94 AU from the Sun at aphelion (5.94 times as far from the Sun as the Earth or slightly more than the distance at which Jupiter orbits). As a comet with a period of less than 20 years, 96P/Machholz is considered to be a Jupiter Family Comet.

Image of 96P/Machholz close to the sun taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory on 8 January 2002. NASA/ESA/Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

See also...

The Daytime Arietid Meteor Shower.

The Arietid Meteor Shower lasts from mid April till late June each year, and is expected to peak before dawn on Tuesday 10 June this year, and originating (appearing to come from) the constellation of Aries. Meteors from this shower can be very bright, leading to the label 'Daytime' Meteors (i.e. meteors that can be seen during the day), although the majority are quite dim, and can be hard to spot. At its peak, the shower can produce about 50 meteors per hour. This year that peak will coincide with the Full Moon, so viewing may be less than optimal.

The origin point for the Aried Meteors seen from the Northern Hemisphere in early June. Spaceweather.

Meteor streams are thought to come from dust shed by comets as they come close to the Sun and their icy surfaces begin to evaporate away. Although the dust is separated from the comet, it continues to orbit the Sun on roughly the same orbital path, creating a visible meteor shower when the Earth crosses that path, and flecks of dust burn in the upper atmosphere, due to friction with the atmosphere.

The Earth passing through a stream of comet dust, resulting in a meteor shower. Not to scale. Astro Bob.

The origin of the Arietid Meteors is unclear. No body has been confidently identified as the source of the Arietid Meteors, though both the asteroid 1566 Icarus and the comet 96P/Machholz have been suggested. 

How the passage of the Earth through a meteor shower creates a radiant point from which they can be observed. In The Sky.

Though the Arietid Meteors can be hard to see, it may be possible to 'hear' them using an FM radio. In order to do this it will be necessary to find a frequency between 88.0 and 108.0 MHz without any transmissions or significant static (this may not be possible in urban areas). Meteors passing though the atmosphere generate radio waves at these frequencies, which can be heard as 'bumps' or 'chirps'. More detailed observations can be used if the radio set-up has a directional antenna, allowing the observer to concentrate on a particular part of the sky (this is essentially what a radio telescope is).

See also...

The Nqweba Bolide and Meteorite Fall Event.

It is thought that more than a hundred tons of cosmic debris enters the Earth's atmosphere every day, mostly in the form of micrometeorites, dust-to-gravel sized particles. Most particles entering the upper atmosphere are derived from the tails of comets, but others are remnants of the original protoplanetary disc from which the Solar System formed, or fragments from the surface of other planets or moons, knocked free by earlier impacts. When these objects enter the atmosphere, they generally do so at very high velocities, causing them to heat rapidly as they pass through the atmosphere, and causing their surfaces to melt and the surrounding gasses to ionise. This can result in a bright streak across the sky called a meteor.

Larger bodies penetrate further into the atmosphere, burning longer and brighter, with those a few tens of centimetres in diameter producing meteors brighter in the sky than the planet Venus, which are termed 'fireballs'. Particularly large fireballs can sometimes be seen to visibly disinitegrate, and are known as bolides. The break up of such bolides is often audible from the ground, although, since they are typically tens of kilometres high, the sound typically reaches observers some time after the visible meteor, which can be confusing.

In a paper published in the South African Journal of Science on 29 May 2025, Roger Gibson of the School of Geosciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, Timothy Cooper of the Comet Asteroid and Meteor Section of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa, Leonidas Vonopartis, also of the School of Geosciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, Carla Dodd of the Department of Geosciences and Institute for Coastal and Marine Research at Nelson Mandela University, Peter Hers of the Garden Route Centre of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa, and Lewis Ashwal and Robyn Symons, once again of the School of Geosciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, describe a bolide event which took place over the coastal belt between Mossel Bay and Gqeberha, and as far north as the southern Karoo, on 25 August 2024.

Slightly before 9.00 am on Sunday 25 August 2024, residents of the area between Mossel Bay and Gqeberha and the southern Karoo heard a noise described as like rolling thunder which persisted for more than 30 seconds, despite the sky being clear of thunderclouds. Some residents of this area also reported ground tremors.

This provoked a great deal of speculation on social media, with people hypothesizing an earthquake, landslide, vehicle collision, aircraft crash, gas or electrical infrastructure explosion, or other events. At 9.02 am, Zoë van der Merwe of Cape St Francis posted a a cluster of rapidly moving, bright, silver-white fireballs in the sky that extinguished within seconds in the general vicinity of Gqeberha.

Selected frame-by-frame analysis of Zoë van der Merwe’s video (reproduced with permission) showing the bolide post-disruption phase with multiple secondary fragments flaring individually over about two seconds before entering dark flight. Gibson et al. (2025).

There is currently a global effort to better understand atmospheric fireball events, involving organisations in many different parts of the world. In Southern Africa, the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa maintains a database of fireball events, with a dedicated webpage where members of the public can report events. They also actively seek out reports of fireballs on social media, and quickly became aware of Zoë van der Merwe's post, and other reports of the Nqweba event, leading them to share reporting guidelines on social media groups. They also received reports of a bulletin on Luister FM, a radio station based in Port Elizabeth, which stated that a meteorite had been observed falling into the sea off the Eastern Cape at around 8.55 am.

Armed with these sources of data, they set out to determine whether the observed objects were in fact derived from a Solar System body, rather than being Human-made space junk re-entering the atmosphere. This is less complex than it sounds, as space junk will typically enter the atmosphere at a low angle and with a slow velocity, most often as a series of such events as debris from the same object falls to Earth. The Nqweba object did not fit this profile, and its occurrence did not coincide with any known satellite debris re-entering the atmosphere, making unlikely that it was space junk.

Initial reports all suggested that the bolide was moving out to sea, possibly splashing down in Jeffreys Bay, to the west of Gqeberha. As more reports came in it became it had been seen over a much wider area, north as far as Petrusburg, and west as far as Ceres. A further three videos of the object emerged, although the one taken by Zoë van der Merwe appears to cover the final part of the meteor's journey.

Shortly before 9.00 am, residents of Nqweba (formerly Kirkwood), about 100 km to the north of Cape St Francis, heard what they described as a loud thunderclap, followed by a long rumbling noise. Slightly after this, 9-year-old Eli-zé du Toit observed something falling through a large Wild Fig tree in her parents garden. When investigated, this turned out to be a rock smaller than her fist, with a shiny black crust, broken in places to reveal a light grey, concrete-like interior. When touched, the exterior layer of this rock was hot, while the interior was cold. Eli-zé's mother, Jesica Botha, posted several images of this and other fragments found in the garden to social media groups, leading to her being contacted by Carla Dodd of Nelson Mandela University.

(a) Photo of main meteorite mass retrieved by Eli-zé du Toit, displaying black fusion crust (top) and the grey interior containing multiple angular rock and mineral fragments. (b) Post submitted by Jesica Botha on the Snow Report Southern Africa Facebook page. Gibson et al. (2025).

Carla Dodd was able to arrange for the meteorite fragments to be transported to Nelson Mandela University for safekeeping; meteorites, along with fossils and archaeological artefacts are protected in South Africa by the National Heritage Resources Act (1999). Here the fragments were weighed, examined and placed into desiccators for storage. This preliminary inspction suggested that the fragments belonged to a type of stoney meteorite called a HED (howardite–eucrite–diogenite) achondrite breccia. These meteorites resemble terrestrial igneous rocks, and are therefore presumed to have come from bodies large enough for magma differentiation and igneous processing to have occurred.

Initial witness reports, and the two sites where meteors were reported to have fallen to Earth, Nqweba and the sea off Cape St Francis, are about 100 km apart, suggesting that the bolide had followed a north-south trajectory, shedding fragments as it went, towards the sea. However, bolides are notoriously confusing for observers, due to the long gap between the visual fireball and the sound reaching witnesses. Careful examination of witness reports and data from remote observation stations eventually led Gibson et al. to conclude that the bolide moved southwest-to-northeast, first appearing off Mossel Bay and moving inland towards Nqweba.

The Nqweba Bolide was the 20th bolide recorded globally in 2024, and one of the smallest. It is thought to have been about 1 m in diameter when it entered the atmosphere, and to have released energy equivalent to that released by the detonation of 92 tons of TNT.

Since 1992, 493 fireball events have been recorded over South Africa, only about 3% of which have been visible during the day. The largest recorded bolide in Southern Africa was the 21 November 2009 event over northern South Africa and southern Botswana, which was probably about 200 times as large as the Nqweba Bolide, although no fragments of this were ever found.

Recovered meteorites in South Africa are strongly linked to observed meteorites, and particularly daytime events, with 21 of 51 known meteorites collected in South Africa connected to observed falls, 75% of these in the daytime. However, prior to the Nqweba Bolide,  the most recent of these fell on Lichtenburg, North West Province, in 1973, long before modern technology such as remote observation stations and mobile phones was available to help track these events.

South Africa is currently increasing its remote observation capacity, and therefore its ability to track fireballs.  It is currently home to 16 cameras running under the auspices of the NASA SETI Institute Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance network, and a further ten operated by the Global Meteor Network (4 of which have been installed in Western Cape schools to promote STEM activities). These are already improving fireball-detection rates, but do not work well in daylight. The collection of meteorite fragments is largely dependent on direct observation of the objects falling, as was the case with the Nqweba Meteorite Fall, but networks of cameras can help triangulate the area in which meteorites might have fallen, improving the chances of finding meteorites which were not directly observed.

See also...

The Quadrantid Meteor Shower.

The Quadrantid Meteor Shower is one of the brightest meteor showers of the year, often producing over 100 meteors per hour at its peak, which falls around 3-4 January each year, and is predicted to peak at about 8.00 am on Friday 3 January 2025; three days after the New Moon, which falls on Tuesday 31 December, visibility for the shower should be reasonably good. The meteor shower originates in the constellation of Boötes, high in the northern sky, which is slightly confusing, as most meteor showers are named for the constellation in which they originate. This is because the constellation was named in the sixteenth century by astronomer Tycho Brahe, before the introduction of standardised constellations used by modern astronomers, though to make matters a little more confusing, Brahe didn't name the meteors this way either; the name comes from the constellation of Quadrans Muralis, introduced by Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande in 1795, and dropped by the International Astronomical Union in 1922. Because Boötes is visible only from the Northern Hemisphere, the Quadrantid Meteor Shower is not visible from the Southern Hemisphere, and is best viewed from northerly locations such as Canada or Scandinavia.

The radiant point of the Quadrantid Meteors (i.e. the point from which the meteors seem to radiate). American Meteor Society.

Meteor streams are thought to come from dust shed by comets as they come close to the Sun and their icy surfaces begin to evaporate away. Although the dust is separated from the comet, it continues to orbit the Sun on roughly the same orbital path, creating a visible meteor shower when the Earth crosses that path, and flecks of dust burn in the upper atmosphere, due to friction with the atmosphere.

The Earth passing through a stream of comet dust, resulting in a meteor shower. Not to scale. Astro Bob.

The Quadrantid Meteors are unusual in that they typically are only visible for a few hours either side of this peak, whereas other showers are typically visible for days or even weeks. This is thought to be because they originate from an asteroid (196256) 2003 EH1, rather than the tail of a comet as with most meteor showers. The orbit of this asteroid is tilted at an angle of 71.9° to the plane of the Solar System, so that the Earth only very briefly passes through the debris trail left by it, rather than remaining in it for some time, as is the case with the trail of a comet with an orbit in roughly the same plane as the Earth.

The calculated orbit and current position (196256) 2003 EH1.  JPL Small Body Database. 

(196256) 2003 EH1 is a 2.6-4.0 km diameter object with a 2017 day (5.52 year) orbital period, with an elliptical orbit tilted at an angle of 70.8° to the plain of the Solar System which takes in to 1.19  AU from the Sun (119% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) and out to 5.05 AU (505% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun slightly inside the orbit of the planet Jupiter). This means that close encounters between the asteroid and Earth happen occasionally, with the last calculated to have happened in December 1936 next predicted in December 2052.  It is therefore classed as an Amor Group Asteroid (an asteroid which comes close to the Earth, but which is never closer to the Sun than the Earth is). (196256) 2003 EH1 also has occasional close encounters with the planet Jupiter, with the last having happened in June 1984, and the next predicted for March 2044.

See also...