Southern Taurid meteors peak this week, with a dark San Jose sky until the moon rises

The Southern Taurid meteor shower peaks overnight Wednesday into Thursday, Nov. 5.  From San Jose, the best time to look is roughly midnight to 3 a.m. Thursday, when the shower's point of origin is highest and before a thin crescent moon rises.

When to look, and how many

The meteors seem to come from the constellation Taurus, which gives the shower its name.  That point is highest around 1 a.m. standard time, the best time to watch, the American Meteor Society says.

In San Jose, the sun sets at 5:06 p.m. Wednesday and twilight ends at 5:33 p.m., U.S. Naval Observatory data show.  The moon, only 12% lit, rises at 3:03 a.m. Thursday.

Don't expect much.  This week the Southern Taurids should give about three meteors an hour from a dark rural site, the American Meteor Society's weekly outlook says; NASA's November guide says about five an hour under ideal skies.  City lights wash out fainter meteors, so from inside San Jose expect fewer.

The National Weather Service forecast issued Monday evening calls for partly cloudy skies Wednesday evening, patchy fog after 1 a.m. and a low around 48, with no rain expected.  Fog during the best hours could cut the count further.  Forecasts can change.

Is it worth staying up?

For most people, no.  Even with no shower at all, a rural observer sees random meteors, called sporadic meteors, on any clear night:  about three an hour in the evening and about eight in the last hour before dawn this week, the same AMS outlook says.  The Southern Taurids add only a few more.

At three an hour, that is about one Taurid every 20 minutes from a dark site, and longer waits from town, after midnight in the cold.  For comparison, the August Perseids typically give 30 to 50 meteors an hour from rural sites, the meteor society says, and NASA says December's Geminids can reach 120 an hour.  If you are already up and the sky is clear, look up.  Otherwise, it is not worth losing sleep over.

Why astronomers still watch

Scientists count the Taurids as a shower because their meteors share a path back to one point in the sky.  What interests them:

Fireballs.  The Taurids carry bigger chunks than most showers.  Ordinary meteors come from pea-sized bits; a softball-sized piece can make a flash as bright as the full moon, the meteor society says.

Jupiter's role.  Jupiter's gravity keeps a clump of those larger pieces bunched together, circling the sun seven times for every two Jupiter orbits, researchers led by Auriane Egal reported in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2022.  Every 3 or 7 years Earth passes near the clump and fireballs jump; in 2015, the last strong swarm, rates doubled, the AMS says.  It calls 2032 exceptional.  This is not a swarm year.

Sorting by size.  Radar, which picks up much smaller particles, found no sign of the clump, the 2022 study says, suggesting small bits drift out of it faster than big ones.  That helps scientists model how a comet's debris spreads over time.

Taurid meteors are bits of debris from Comet 2P/Encke, a small comet about 4.8 kilometers (3 miles) wide, according to NASA material.  It does not come by every 200 years:  Encke circles the sun every 3.3 years, the shortest orbit of any known comet.  Every fall, Earth passes through the trail of dust and pebbles it has shed, and each bit burns up as a streak of light in our atmosphere.

A second chance comes with the Northern Taurids around Nov. 12, just after the Nov. 8 new moon.

Source:  American Meteor Society, "Meteor Activity Outlook for October 31-November 6, 2026" (Nov. 2, 2026), 2026 meteor shower calendar and "Will There Be a Swarm of Taurid Meteors This Year?" (2022); Egal and others, "An observational synthesis of the Taurid meteor complex," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2022 (doi:10.1093/mnras/stac397); NASA Science, "What's Up: November 2026," Comet 2P/Encke and Geminids pages (NASA material, summarized by AI for the Daily News; NASA did not review this story); National Weather Service San Francisco Bay Area forecast for San Jose, issued 8:45 p.m. PST Nov. 2, 2026; U.S. Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Department, sun and moon data for San Jose (37.34 N, 121.89 W), Pacific Standard Time, retrieved Nov. 2, 2026.