Ursid meteor shower 2026

A quiet shower on the longest nights

The Ursids peak within a day of the December solstice, so they fall on the longest nights of the northern year: about 14.7 hours from sunset to sunrise at 40°N and nearly 16 at 50°N. That is a lot of dark sky for a shower that, in most years, delivers little. The ZHR is about 10, and because the radiant never climbs very high from mid-latitudes, real counts run at roughly half that. Expect around five an hour from a dark site, more toward dawn.

The meteors arrive at about 33 km/s, close to the speed of the Geminids a week earlier, and they look similar in pace: medium-speed, easy-to-follow streaks. Most are faint, though. Ursid meteoroids are fragile comet dust that begins to burn noticeably higher in the atmosphere than the dense Geminid grains, and bright Ursids are uncommon outside outbursts.

The annual maximum is short, with rates above half their peak for only about half a day, and its timing wanders a little from year to year. Some years add a brief burst on top of it. Those occasional jumps, rather than the usual trickle, are why dedicated observers keep watching the Ursids.

Comet Tuttle and dust that waits for aphelion

The parent is comet 8P/Tuttle, which orbits the Sun every 13.6 years on a path tilted 55° to Earth’s. At perihelion it comes to just outside Earth’s distance from the Sun, and at aphelion it reaches about 10.4 AU, a little beyond the orbit of Saturn. Arecibo radar imaging in 2008 showed a nucleus about 10 km long with two lobes, consistent with a contact binary, and picked up an echo from slow-moving grains a centimeter or more across, of the kind expected to feed the Ursid stream.

The shower’s oddest habit is when its outbursts happen. Many come when the comet is near aphelion, far from Earth, rather than in the years around perihelion, when Leonid outbursts, for example, tend to happen. Modeling by Peter Jenniskens, Esko Lyytinen and colleagues explains why. Some of the dust released centuries ago is trapped in a mean-motion resonance with Jupiter, which keeps it clumped. It takes about six centuries for the dust’s perihelion distance to shrink enough to cross Earth’s path, and by then it trails the comet by about six years. Their model matched the 1945 and 1986 outbursts to dust released in 1392 and 1378.

Following the Little Dipper through the night

The radiant lies about 2° from Kochab, the brighter of the two stars at the outer end of the Little Dipper’s bowl, and only about 15° from the north celestial pole. North of about 15°N it is circumpolar: it never sets, so Ursids can appear at any hour of the night. From 40°N the radiant sits roughly 25° high in the north in the evening, below Polaris, and swings up to about 50° in the north-northeast by the start of morning twilight. Rates follow it, so the hours before dawn are best.

The farther north you are, the better the shower works. At 50°N the radiant is never lower than about 35° and reaches nearly 60° before dawn; in Scandinavia and Canada it stays higher still. From the tropics it hugs the northern horizon, and south of roughly 15°S it never rises at all, which effectively makes this a Northern Hemisphere shower.

Face north and let the Little Dipper anchor your view. Late Geminids are still around in the first days of the Ursid window, but their radiant lies in Gemini, well away from the pole, and the faster Comae Berenicids come from north of Leo. A meteor that traces back toward the Little Dipper is an Ursid. Cold is the main practical problem on a solstice night; the how-to-watch guide covers staying comfortable for hours.

Bečvář’s outburst and the trail predictions

Comet Tuttle was first seen by Pierre Méchain in Paris on January 9, 1790, and found again by Horace Tuttle on January 5, 1858. Alexander Herschel listed it as a possible meteor source in 1874, but the shower drew little attention until December 1945, when Antonín Bečvář’s team at Skalnaté Pleso Observatory in what is now Slovakia recorded an outburst. Bečvář’s first report gave 169 meteors per hour; a later reanalysis by Zdeněk Ceplecha found a 10-minute peak of about 108 per hour.

A second major outburst came in December 1986, recorded by radio observers and by visual observers in Norway and the United Kingdom. Estimates of its strength range from about 50 to more than 100 per hour, depending on the analysis.

Jenniskens and Lyytinen used the same trail calculations to predict an outburst for December 22, 2000. Observers in California saw the ZHR climb to about 90 at 08:06 UT, close to the predicted times, which was strong support for the idea. Smaller enhancements have since been reported in several years, including 2014, when Canadian radar data suggested a ZHR above 50.

The shower is also called the Ursa Minorids, after the constellation that holds its radiant. Even now it is one of the less-observed showers on the calendar: winter weather keeps many observers indoors, and the International Meteor Organization notes that further outbursts may simply have been missed.