Depending on where you live, they could be pretty tricky to spot.
Photographer Jeffrey Berkes took the image of the Quadrantid meteor shower over the Florida Keys in 2012.
The main challenge in spotting the Quadrantids is catching them when they are active because they are a very short-lived display. The Quadrantids characteristically spend only about 12 hours rising from quarter-strength to peak activity and their subsequent decline can take as little as 4 hours. Also, from different hemispheres on Earth, skywatchers report seeing the Quadrantids in dramatically different numbers.There is good news and bad news for this year’s Quadrantid meteor show.
But for skywatchers in North America, you'll be facing the"wrong way" when this shower reaches its peak. The shower peaks in the mid-afternoon during the bright sunny daytime. That means that many skywatchers will have essentially no chance of seeing meteors streaking across the sky during the shower's peak. While the timing of the shower's peak isn't great for many skywatchers, there are certainly other times during which you might spot some"shooting stars.
The shower will be building toward its peak later that day, but you still might glimpse as many as 15 to possibly 30 meteors per hour. While this isn't the onslaught of bright meteor streaks that observers in East Asia might see, it's still enough meteor activity to be entertaining and to perhaps lure you outside during the early morning hours. Just like December's Geminids meteor shower, the Quadrantids are cosmic debris shed not by a comet, but a near-Earth asteroid.
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