The Ursid meteor shower, last in the annual list, should peak in the night between December 22 and 23.
This is 3 days after first quarter Moon, so the waxing Moon and its glare will not be out of the sky till after midnight.
The Ursids’ radiant – the point from which the “shooting stars” fly to any part of the sky – sloping up over the northern horizon in the early night. The Moon is higher along the ecliptic.
To quote from the “meteors” section of Astronomical Calendar 2023<$>: the Ursids “radiate from near Kokab, the beta star of Ursa Minor, at the other end of the Little Dipper from Polaris… This radiant is (for latitude 40° north) in the sky all night, fairly low over the north horizon in the early night, almost overhead by dawn… The parent comet is 8P Tuttle, which at intervals of 13.5 years drops steeply from the north through a perihelion close to Earth’s orbit; its last perihelion was in August 2021. (Comet and meteors revolve almost in the plane of the Milky Way, though in the opposite direction to that of the stars.) The meteors are of medium speed, mostly faint but with a few fireballs; during the shower’s brief peak 9 or 10 per hour may be seen, up to 50 especially when the comet is near; in 1945 and 1986 the rate was over 100.”
So this is is usually a minor meteor stream. The zenithal hourly rate (ZHR, average number an observer might count in a clear dark sky with the radiant overhead) is only 10, compared with 150 for the Geminids of Dec. 14. So the Ursids tend to be under-observed – anti-climax after the Geminids, cold nights near the northern winter solstice, preoccupation with Christmas?
The predicted peak for 2023 is Dec. 23 4h by Universal Time, which is 5 hours earlier by clocks in North America’s Eastern time zone, thus 11 PM in Dec. 22.
Season’s Greetings! thank You for all the information and graphics through all these years. much appreciated!