Look Up: Illinois Has Meteor Showers Over The Next Few Days

Some years, the shooting stars of the Taurid Meteor Shower are pretty weak, with only a couple of them visible per hour, but in other years, like this one, there's a really good chance the the Taurids are well worth staying up late to see.

The 2024 version of the Taurid Meteor Shower is very promising, according to the astronomy experts out there. If their predictions turn out to be accurate, you could be looking at anywhere between 8 and 15 shooting stars per hour.

That number is really good, but it will more than likely pale in comparison to the sky-show we'll see next month as we approach Christmas. The Geminids, which can sometimes produce up to 100 meteors per hour, will occur in mid-December.

The Taurid Meteor Shower Is Created By Earth Passing Through A Stream Of Debris From A Comet Called "Encke," And NASA Calls The Taurids Very Active This Year

We haven't gotten a really good swarm of Taurid meteors since 2022, so the experts seem to think that we're overdue for a pretty cool and colorful show in the skies above Northern Illinois.

The Taurids, according to NASA, are created when dust from that boringly named comet Encke hits Earth's atmosphere at around 65,000 miles per hour and burns up in spectacular fashion:

Taurid meteors tend to be larger than the norm, which means they are bright, many being fireballs. They also penetrate deeper into Earth’s atmosphere than many other shower meteors. For example, Orionids typically burn up at altitudes of 58 miles, whereas Taurids make it down to 42 miles.

The shooting stars from the Taurids also move much more slowly than with other meteor showers, which gives you more time to follow them through the night sky. The best time to head outside to look for the Taurids is around midnight local time.

If You've Got A Decent Telescope Or Binoculars, You May See Something Really, Really Cool

And that would be the Taurid meteors actually striking the moon. I've never seen that phenomenon, and would totally be into the idea of checking it out.

NASA.gov:

Because they are big and possess a goodly amount of energy (imagine a 1 inch hunk of ice moving at 63,000 mph — 29 times faster than a bullet from an M-16 rifle), they produce decent quantities of light when they strike the surface of the Moon. This makes Taurid lunar impacts easy to see with Earth-based telescopes; in fact, the first lunar meteoroid impact observed by NASA was a Taurid back on November 7th of 2005, and we detected it with a 10″ telescope of the same type used by amateurs all over the world!

These two videos give you a good look at a moon-hit: