Taurid Fireball Season Peaks This Week: Southern Taurids Top Out on November 4–5

November's sky season opens this week with the most theatrical meteors of the autumn. The Southern Taurid meteor shower reaches its peak on the night of Wednesday, November 4 into Thursday, November 5, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS) — the first of three November shower peaks, and the one known for fireballs: meteors bright enough to light up the sky as they break apart. The shower has been active since September 20 and runs through November 20; what peaks around November 5 is its fireball-rich swarm component.

Conditions this year cooperate. The Moon will be a waning crescent, only about 25% illuminated on the peak night, so moonlight should cause relatively little interference — the main variable left is cloud. Both Taurid branches are already active overhead: the two overlapping streams were producing their 'Halloween fireballs' over the weekend just passed, and the overlap period in late October and early November is exactly when the AMS notes fireball reports sometimes rise.

The Taurids will never win on numbers. The AMS rate for the Southern branch is about five meteors an hour under ideal dark-sky conditions, and the Northern branch, which peaks a week later on November 11–12, adds about five more while the two overlap — roughly ten an hour combined around midnight. What they offer instead is quality. Taurid meteors strike the upper atmosphere at about 28 kilometres per second, the slowest entry speed of any well-known annual shower, so a bright one can hang in view for a second or more, fragmenting as it goes and sometimes leaving a brief smoky trail.

That slowness comes from the source. The Southern Taurids trace back to Comet Encke, which orbits the Sun every 3.3 years; the Northern Taurids are linked to asteroid 2004 TG10, on a very similar orbit and possibly a large fragment of the same long-vanished parent comet. The stream carries pebble-sized grains rather than fine dust, which is why a small share of its meteors — about 1% in an ordinary year, by published estimates — flare into true fireballs. This is an ordinary year: the next predicted Taurid swarm year is 2032.

Taurids appear to radiate from the constellation Taurus, near the orange star Aldebaran and the Pleiades cluster. The radiant climbs through the evening and stands highest around midnight, which makes the hours around and after midnight the best window — meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, so the technique is simply a dark place, a wide view, and 20 to 30 minutes for your eyes to adjust. No telescope helps; binoculars narrow the view you need.

If clouds take the peak night, the Taurids forgive: neither branch has a sharp maximum, so rates ramble across the surrounding nights rather than switching off. And the month keeps offering. The Northern Taurids peak on November 11–12 under a Moon only about 3–4% lit, and the faster Leonids — about 15 meteors an hour at peak, moving at roughly 44 miles per second — follow on November 16–17. On WorldEye, clear dark sites are easy to scout ahead of time on the dark-sky cameras page, and the same northern sky is watched live on our aurora webcams.

Bright Taurids are also data. The American Meteor Society collects eyewitness fireball reports from the public, and a well-reported fireball's path can be reconstructed from them — where it entered, how deep it got, and whether anything might have survived to the ground. The famous benchmark is a Halloween fireball NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office tracked over Tennessee in 2012, last seen at an altitude of just 18.1 miles — unusually low for a meteor, and a reminder that the Taurid stream carries material big enough to push deep into the atmosphere.

So the plan for this week is simple: pick the clearest night from November 4 onward, get away from streetlights, look up around midnight, and be patient. Five meteors an hour sounds sparse until one of them is a fireball. For more of the night sky watched live, see our guide to northern lights live webcams — the same dark, clear conditions that suit meteors suit aurora watchers too.