Taurid meteor shower 2026

Slow meteors, a few at a time

Taurids arrive at about 27 km/s, slower than any major shower except the Draconids. They drift rather than dart, and a bright one can take a second or more to cross the sky. The numbers are low: around five an hour is a good showing even at the maximum.

Fireballs are the draw. In video records, most Taurid fireballs belong to the Southern branch. In an ordinary year, though, fireballs make up about 1 percent of visual Taurids, roughly the same share as for the Perseids or Geminids. The reputation comes from how unhurried a Taurid fireball is, and from swarm years, when that share can approach 2.4–4.6 percent near the maximum. The stream is also the only major shower known to contain meter-sized meteoroids.

The season is long and flat. Taurids appear from late September into early December, with the Southern branch peaking around November 5–6 and the Northern branch around November 12–13. The Southern branch also shows a weaker early bump in mid-October. The Northern maximum seems to be a plateau of about ten days rather than a single night.

November nights at mid-northern latitudes last about fourteen hours, and the radiant is up for nearly all of them.

Comet Encke and a stream split in two

The parent is 2P/Encke, a comet with one of the shortest orbital periods known, about 3.3 years. Its nucleus is about 4.8 km across, and at perihelion it passes closer to the Sun than Mercury’s average distance. Pierre Méchain first saw it in January 1786, but sightings over the following decades were not recognized as a single comet until Johann Franz Encke computed its orbit in 1819.

The stream is old and has fanned out so widely that Earth meets it along two separate branches: the Southern Taurids, whose radiant lies a few degrees south of the ecliptic, and the Northern Taurids, a few degrees north of it. Earth meets the same complex again in June, as two daytime showers detected mainly by radar: the Beta Taurids and the Zeta Perseids.

The dates, rates and radiant on this page follow the Southern branch, the stronger of the two: the IMO lists it as active from September 20 to November 20 with a ZHR of about 7. The Northern branch runs from October 20 to December 10 at a ZHR of about 5 and peaks about a week later, from a radiant roughly 7° farther north.

Embedded in the stream is the Taurid swarm, a clump of larger meteoroids held in a 7:2 resonance with Jupiter: seven orbits around the Sun for every two of Jupiter’s. Earth passes close to it only in certain years.

Two fuzzy radiants in Taurus, up from dusk to dawn

In early November the two radiants lie side by side in western Taurus, about 6° apart. The Southern radiant sits roughly 10° south of the Pleiades. By mid-November the Northern radiant sits just a few degrees south of the cluster. Both drift a little under a degree east each night, and in October they lie in Aries.

Neither radiant is a point: the IMO treats each as an oval about 20° by 10°, so a slow meteor whose path leads back to the area around and south of the Pleiades is probably a Taurid.

The radiant rises within about an hour of sunset, so Taurids are possible all night. From 40°N it is above 45° from about 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. local standard time, peaking near 60° in the south around 12:30 a.m. From 30–35°S it reaches 40–45° in the north at about the same hour. The IMO rates northern observers somewhat better placed, since the radiant stays usefully high through more of their long November night.

Faster showers overlap the season. The Orionids in late October trace back to the east of Taurus, near Betelgeuse, and move more than twice as fast. The Leonids in mid-November come from Leo, which rises around midnight, and are faster still. The November Orionids, late in the month, have a radiant near the Northern Taurid one, but their higher speed gives them away. For general setup, see how to watch a meteor shower; with the radiant up all night, this is also a good shower for leaving a camera running in hope of a fireball (how to photograph meteor showers).

From Whipple’s orbits to the 2015 swarm

Historical records suggest the Taurids may have been one of the most important sources of fireballs around the 11th century. In 1940 Fred Whipple used photographic meteor orbits to tie the stream to Comet Encke. In 1984 Victor Clube and Bill Napier proposed that Encke is the largest surviving fragment of a much bigger comet that broke apart some 20,000 years ago, an idea still debated.

The swarm hypothesis came from David Asher and Victor Clube’s work on the 7:2 resonance in the early 1990s. Using Nippon Meteor Society fireball records, kept since 1972, Asher and Izumi showed in 1998 that activity was enhanced in the predicted years. Researchers now count 1988, 1991, 1995, 1998, 2005 and 2015 as swarm returns.

The 2015 return was the best documented. The European Fireball Network photographed about 200 Taurid fireballs, and a study of 144 of them found 113 on a distinct new branch inside the 7:2 resonance. Meteoroid masses ranged from a tenth of a gram to over 1,000 kg. The authors identified two asteroids, 2015 TX24 and 2005 UR, each 200–300 m across, as probable members. A later study of 16 Taurid fireballs, mostly from that swarm, found the material too weak to reach the ground as meteorites.

The same resonance model flagged 2022 and 2025 as swarm years, and it puts Earth very close to the swarm’s center in 2032.