The best gift to start the year: Quadrantids 2022

Composition of some of the Geminids captured by sky-live.tv videomaker D. Padrón during the night of 13-14 December 2021, from the Teide Observatory (Tenerife, Canary Islands). Credit: D. Padrón (sky-live.tv)

In the early hours of 4 January, the European Interreg EELabs project will broadcast the Quadrantid meteor shower from the Teide Observatory of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias on the sky-live.tv channel.

The Geminids and the Quadrantids are, together with the Perseids, the most intense meteor showers of the year, with an activity of almost 100 meteors per hour (ZHR, zenithal hourly rates) and which remains constant year after year (quadrantid activity year 2021 in IMO). The night of 3 to 4 January will also be an optimal time for observing this star shower, as the absence of the Moon will allow even the faintest meteors to be seen.

The Quadrantids show their peak activity in the first week of January. For 2022, the maximum is expected at 20:40 UT on 3 January. Therefore, in Europe, the night of 3 to 4 January will be the best time to observe them. However, we will have to wait until the early morning of 4 January, when the constellation of the Buoyant Star will be high in the sky. It is expected that we will be able to see -on average- a meteor every four minutes, some of them very bright if we are in a place without light pollution and with clear horizons.

Because the radiant – the point in the sky where the meteors seem to be “born” – is located close to the Big Dipper – specifically in the constellation of the Boyero, which occupies part of the defunct Quadrans Muralis, hence its name – hardly any Quadrantids will be visible from the southern hemisphere.

Quadrantids and Geminids are unique meteor showers

The so-called ‘shooting stars’ are actually small dust particles of various sizes, some smaller than grains of sand, that comets leave behind as they orbit the Sun. The resulting stream of particles (called meteoroids), due to the ‘melting’ produced by solar heat, is scattered by the comet’s orbit and is passed by the Earth each year in its orbit around the Sun. During this encounter, the dust particles disintegrate as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, creating the familiar luminous trails known scientifically as meteors. This is true for most showers but not for the Quadrantids and Geminids. There is no comet that matches the trajectory of the “debris” cloud. The progenitors of these meteor showers are asteroids, 3200 Phaeton in the case of the Geminids and 2003 EH for the Quadrantids.

Live from Teide Observatory

As part of the dissemination activities of the European Interreg EELabs project (eelabs.eu), the sky-live.tv channel will broadcast this star shower live from the Teide Observatory (Tenerife). The event will take place in the early hours of Tuesday 4 January at 6:00 UT (local time in the Canary Islands, 7:00 CET, local time in Europe) at https://sky-live.tv/. Although, for those who wish to enjoy this spectacle outdoors, from 02:00 UT, the constellation of the Buoyant Star will be over the horizon, so we will start to see some of these meteors.

“Neither cold nor sleep should be an obstacle for the observation of the Quadrantids, which always surprise us with bright fireballs. Moreover, this year, with a dark night without the Moon, we will also be able to see the faintest meteors,” says Miquel Serra-Ricart, astronomer at the IAC.

EELabs (eelabs.eu) is a project funded by the INTERREG V-A MAC Programme 2014-2020, co-financed by the European Union’s ERDF (European Regional Development Fund), under contract number MAC2/4.6d/238. EELabs involves 5 Macaronesian centres (IAC, ITER, UPGC, SPEA-Azores, SPEA-Madeira). The objective of EELabs is to create Laboratories to measure the Energy Efficiency of Artificial Night Light in protected natural areas of Macaronesia (Canary Islands, Madeira and Azores).

Three Spanish Supercomputing centres: the Centro Extremeño de Tecnologías Avanzadas (CETA-CIEMAT), the Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya (CSUC) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) will collaborate in the distribution of the web portal broadcast (sky-live.tv).

Material audiovisual

• Mejores cuadrántidas año 2020 (https://flic.kr/p/2iaZdr7) 
• Imágenes y vídeos de lluvias de estrellas (https://flic.kr/s/aHsjH2BFa4)
• Viaje en un Cometa -formación meteoroides: https://youtu.be/iCoqxLjMmmU
• Simulación órbita Cuadrántidas: https://www.meteorshowers.org/view/Quadrantids