The first meteor shower of the year peaks on the night of January 2-3. Here's everything you need to know to watch it and the many other showers that will appear in 2025.
If you want to get into stargazing in 2025, there's no better place to start than viewing a meteor shower. Meteor showers, or shooting stars, happen when Earth's orbital path crosses a path of debris left by a comet and that material burns up in the Earth's atmosphere. Watching a meteor shower is one of the most accessible ways to engage with the night sky.
The first shower of the year is the Quadrantids, which peaks overnight on January 2-3 but will be visible until mid-January. The Quadrantids is just one of nine major meteor showers that will grace skies in 2025, and details of when they will appear in the northern hemisphere are listed below -- so mark your calendar for these.
You don't need any special equipment to see a meteor shower -- in fact, using devices like binoculars or telescopes actually prevents you from seeing meteors, because they travel too fast to be seen through the lenses of such equipment. All you need are your eyes, a dark sky with little to no moonlight, and a location that's away from excess light, as moonlight and light pollution can wash out shooting stars.
Note that the moon appears (rises) and disappears (sets) in the night sky at different times depending on what time zone you are in. All moonrise/moonset times in this piece are for the eastern US -- you can use tools like Time and Date's moonrise/moonset calendar or this tool from the US Naval Observatory to check the precise moonrise/moonset times in your exact location.
You should allow your eyes about half an hour to adjust to the darkness. If you need to use a flashlight while outside, use one with red light instead of white to preserve your night vision.
Each meteor shower is named after its radiant, or the constellation that the shower appears to come from. A meteor shower's radiant usually needs to be above the horizon before you can see the meteors. You don't need to look directly at the radiant to see meteors; shooting stars will be visible throughout the entire sky once the radiant has risen.
If you need help finding a shower's radiant, you can use an app like Stellarium, which can also tell you when the radiant will be above the horizon in your exact location. If you really want to maximize the number of meteors you'll see, you should watch the sky when the shower's radiant reaches its highest point in the sky. However, you don't need to wait until the radiant is at its highest to enjoy the show -- as long as the radiant is above the horizon, you should be able to see plenty of shooting stars.
The Quadrantids started appearing on December 26, 2024, and will last until January 16, 2025, peaking overnight on January 2-3. This meteor shower has a sharp peak, meaning that most of its activity occurs in a narrow window of time, so you won't want to miss your opportunity to observe the night sky on January 2. The Quadrantids typically produce many fireball meteors -- that is, meteors that are very bright -- with up to 120 meteors per hour during the shower's peak.
On the night of January 2-3, the moon will be about 9 percent illuminated and will set around 8 pm in the eastern US and several hours earlier in Europe, so viewing conditions will be perfect from a light perspective. However, cloud cover is likely to obscure viewing across central Europe as well as the Northwest and Midwest of the US, though visibility should be good in other parts of the US as well as across most of the UK. You can check local cloud conditions here.