Get ready, skygazers. You can start marking your calendar for upcoming meteor showers, with April kicking off a much more active stretch for skywatchers in the Northern Hemisphere.
After a long lull at the start of the year — when the Quadrantids meteor shower peaked just after New Year’s, and little else followed — meteor activity is finally picking up again, bringing two showers into view as the month begins.
The first meteor shower is the Lyrids, which begins on April 14 and continues until the end of the month. This is a relatively minor meteor shower fed by the C/1861 G1 comet, also known as Thatcher after its discoverer, A.E. Thatcher, in 1861. It’s a long-period comet that takes 415.5 years to orbit the sun.
The Lyrids meteor shower peaks on April 21-22 and will produce somewhere between 15 and 20 meteors per hour under optimal conditions. Per the American Meteor Society, the peak
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