Draconid Meteor Shower 2021 Will Peak October 8

• Draconid Meteor Shower 2021 Will Peak October 8
  by Bruce McClure and Deborah Byrd, https://earthsky.org/
  Draconid meteor shower 2021
  Unlike many meteor showers, the Draconids are short-lived. In 2021, watch these meteors at nightfall and early evening on October 8. You might catch some on the nights before and after, as well. Fortunately, the thin waxing crescent moon sets before nightfall. It won’t hinder this year’s Draconid shower. The radiant point for the Draconid meteor shower almost coincides with the head of the constellation Draco the Dragon in the northern sky. That’s why the Draconids are best viewed from the Northern Hemisphere. The Draconid shower is a real oddity, in that the radiant point stands highest in the sky as darkness falls. That means that, unlike many meteor showers, more Draconids are likely to fly in the evening hours than in the morning hours after midnight. This shower is usually a sleeper, producing only a handful of languid meteors per hour in most years. But watch out if the Dragon awakes! In rare instances, fiery Draco has been known to spew forth many hundreds of meteors in a single hour.
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  October’s Draconid meteor shower is sometimes called the Giacobinids. This shower produced awesome meteor displays in 1933 and 1946, with thousands of meteors per hour seen in those years. European observers saw over 600 meteors per hour in 2011.
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  The Draconid shower is active between October 6 and 10. As noted above, the best evening to watch in 2021 is likely October 8. Try the evenings of October 7 and 9 also. Be sure to watch in a dark sky.
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• How to see the 2021 Draconid meteor shower
  by Pete Lawrence, https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/
  The 2021 Draconid meteor shower will be best seen on the evening of 8 October. Their radiant – the point from which the meteors appear to emanate in the night sky – is the constellation Draco, which can be found near the constellation Ursa Minor.
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  Typically, the Draconids produce a peak zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of 10 meteors per hour, this being the total number of meteors you might expect to see under perfectly dark, clear conditions with the meter shower’s radiant overhead.
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  However, short-term Draconid meteor boosts – up to 300 meteors per hour – have been seen in recent years. They are slow moving meteors with an atmospheric entry speed of 21km/s. The Draconid meteor shower could well be one of the top meteor showers to observe in October 2021, due to a convenient lack of bright moonlight. That pesky Moon, which will wipe out a lot of the Orionid meteor shower later in the month, is new on Wednesday 6 October and will not interfere with the 2021 Draconids.
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  Draconid meteor shower trails are especially slow, the meteoroids entering Earth’s atmosphere at 21km/s – less than one-third the speed of November’s Leonid meteorids. The Draconids (also known unofficially as the Giacobinids, in reference to the parent comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner) have a low ZHR peak value, but increased activity has been observed over the past few years.
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  The shower put on spectacular displays in 1933 and 1946, with ZHR rates measured at thousands of meteors per hour. Enhanced rates were also seen in 1998, 2005, 2011 and 2012.
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