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    "headline": "Northern Taurid fireballs light up skies this week; how to tell one from a contrail and report it",
    "description": "Northern Taurid fireballs are still flying this week; the American Meteor Society explains how to tell one from a contrail and how to report it.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-15T00:30:00+00:00",
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    "articleSection": "Science",
    "keywords": "American Meteor Society, Leonids, Northern Taurids, Taurids",
    "articleBody": "If a slow, brilliant streak crosses your sky this week, odds are good it is a Northern Taurid, and the American Meteor Society wants to hear about it. The shower is still running past its peak, its meteors hit the air at a leisurely 28 kilometers per second, and the stream is known for the occasional fireball, a meteor brighter than about magnitude minus 4, roughly as bright as Venus. We covered the peak itself in our Northern Taurid peak-night guide. This guide is about what to do after you see something: how to know whether it was really a fireball, and how to make your sighting count. When and where to look in the US, UK and Canada The Northern Taurid radiant, the patch of sky the meteors seem to fly out from, sits in northwestern Taurus about two degrees south of the Pleiades star cluster. In the society’s weekly outlook, the radiant is best placed around 1 a.m. local standard time, when it stands highest in the southern sky. That works the same way in New York, Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver, London and Edinburgh, because all of them are on standard time now. Expect about three Northern Taurids an hour from a dark site, plus a few from the Southern Taurids, whose radiant lies close by. Two tips from the outlook. First, do not stare at the Pleiades; keep the radiant near the edge of your view, since meteors streak outward and appear anywhere. Second, the evening crescent Moon after the November 9 new moon sets early, so the darkest skies come late at night. Fireball or contrail? Many reports the society receives turn out to be airplane contrails lit up in orange and red by the low Sun around dusk or dawn. Its rule of thumb is about time: A fireball lasts a few seconds. If you had time to pull out your phone and take a photo, it was almost certainly something else. A contrail hangs around for minutes or hours. If clouds were in front of what you saw, it was not a meteor. Meteors burn up far above the highest clouds. How to report what you saw The society collects fireball reports from around the world through an online form. When several people report the same event, its analysts can sometimes reconstruct the object’s path through the atmosphere. Before you file, try to note: Brightness compared with something familiar: Venus at its brightest is about magnitude minus 4.5, a first-quarter Moon about minus 9.4. Note color, how long it lasted, and where it started and ended against the stars or by compass direction and height above the horizon. If a very bright one explodes, keep listening for a full five minutes; sound travels only about 20 kilometers a minute, so any sonic boom would arrive 1.5 to 4 minutes later. Why Taurids are worth reporting Several thousand fireball-class meteors hit Earth’s atmosphere every day, the society estimates, but most fall over oceans, empty land or in daylight. For a typical watcher, a magnitude minus 4 fireball turns up about once every 20 hours of observing, and a minus 6 event about once every 200 hours. The Taurid stream tilts those odds a little, because it carries pebble-sized debris rather than fine dust, and anything larger than a pebble can flare into a bolide as bright as the Moon. Do the arithmetic: a three-hour session from midnight is about 15 percent of the 20-hour average wait for a Venus-bright meteor, so it pays to stay out longer and to watch with friends. The same predawn sky now holds the Leonids, the fastest major shower at 69 kilometers per second, which peak on November 18. Our Leonid meteor shower guide explains when to look. A quick Leonid flash from the east is a different animal from a slow Taurid glide out of the south. Further reading Wikipedia: Taurids Image: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. Dai, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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