The Northern Taurid meteor shower is reaching its peak, giving people who missed last week’s Southern Taurids another chance to watch a brilliant fireball flash across the sky. The best viewing window arrives Wednesday night and continues into early Thursday morning.

Dark conditions are expected following Monday’s new moon. Meteors should appear as flashes of light lasting a few seconds, while especially large pieces of debris could create much brighter displays.

“The observing conditions should be very good,” said Mark Boslough, a research professor in the department of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico. “There’s no moonlight to really interfere with getting to see these.”

Meteor showers develop when Earth moves through trails of debris left by asteroids or comets orbiting the sun. Pieces of ice and rock enter Earth’s atmosphere, burn up and produce visible streaks of light.

The Taurid meteor showers are particularly known for fireballs that can shine brighter than Venus, one of Earth’s closest planetary neighbors. These dramatic flashes come from larger debris, with pieces ranging in size from a marble to a small boulder.

Some fireballs leave shining lines of ionized air molecules that vanish after several seconds. Others produce smoke trails made of cloudlike vapor that can remain visible for minutes.

Viewers should find a dark location and give their eyes about half an hour to adjust without looking at bright screens. NASA projects that the waxing crescent moon will be 4% full, making Wednesday night favorable for watching the shower even though peak activity arrives at 1 p.m. ET Thursday.

The bright streaks will appear to emerge from the Taurus constellation, but observers do not need to stare at that part of the sky. Taurid meteors can become visible anywhere overhead as they radiate outward.

“One of the interesting things about the Taurid meteor shower is that it does produce these larger objects,” Boslough said. “You don’t necessarily have to look at the constellation — they radiate out of the constellation, but you can see them anywhere in the sky.”

The Northern Taurids remain active from October 20 through December 10 and usually produce about five meteors per hour. When they overlap with the Southern Taurids, which end November 12, the combined rate doubles.

Boslough’s research team studies meteor showers to assess the danger posed by objects that could strike Earth. In 2025, the team published a paper focused specifically on the Taurid stream, which researchers suggest could contain more potentially dangerous objects.

“The planetary defense experts are interested in the Taurid meteors,” Boslough said. “Observations of this meteor shower will tell us whether there’s anything in there that could put us at risk.”

The annual Northern Taurid shower occurs as Earth passes through debris associated with an asteroid called 2004 TG10, which was discovered in 2004. Scientists think the asteroid was once part of a much larger object that broke apart roughly 20,000 years ago, creating the Encke Complex.

Comet Encke, which is associated with the Southern Taurids, is another smaller object thought to have resulted from that breakup. A more recent study theorized that 2004 TG10 is only one of 10 asteroids responsible for the Northern Taurids, according to EarthSky.

“It’s not a simple meteor stream,” Boslough said, comparing the Taurids with the Perseids meteor shower in August. “With the Taurids, there’s many different components to the complex.”

Boslough and other scientists are preparing to examine a particularly dense Taurid meteor shower expected in 2032. His team plans to use a telescope to locate small, dark objects by detecting the heat they emit.

Researchers broadly know where a cluster of dangerous debris may appear, but Boslough said the monitoring reflects due diligence rather than an immediate concern that an object will hit Earth. Scientists are continuing to investigate the possibility of hazardous projectiles within the stream.

“The idea that there is a dense swarm of dangerous objects, that’s completely hypothetical — there’s very little evidence for that,” Boslough said. “But we can’t eliminate the chance that the risk during those times is extremely elevated.”