The Perseids Meteor Shower Returns To Our Skies This Week

Missing the Northern Lights and their repeated visits to UK skies in the last few winters? Fear not: there’s another celestial sight coming this month, which should be visible from the UK. Keep your eyes peeled for the Perseid meteor shower, one of the world’s largest displays of shooting stars, set to reach its peak on 12 to 13 August 2025

When & How To See The Perseid Meteor Shower

There are many meteor showers each year, but the Perseid is the most dazzling. Caused by Earth’s orbit passing through space debris (bits of ice and rock) left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle, the Perseids are essentially meteoroids that burn up as they hit the Earth’s atmosphere, producing the streams of light in the sky we Earthlings know as shooting stars.

Thanks to its highly elliptical orbit, Comet Swift-Tuttle takes 133 years to complete one full orbit around the sun. A large comet measuring approximately 16 miles in diameter, every time Comet Swift-Tuttle returns to our solar system, it leaves a great deal of debris in its wake. So much so, when Earth passes through the disarray every year, there is enough material to produce the Perseids again and again, raining down on Earth annually in August. (That said, the showers are much more intense in the few years immediately following Comet Swift-Tuttle’s return when debris is larger and more thickly clumped together.)

Discovered by Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle in 1862, the last time Comet Swift-Tuttle was spotted close to the sun was 1992, and it is expected to return in exactly one century’s time: 2125. In 2126, it is thought Comet Swift-Tuttle will pass so close to Earth it will be visible with the naked eye.

Back in 1867, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was the very first person to make the connection between Comet Swift-Tuttle’s path and the Perseid Meteor Shower – and the very first person to connect any comet to any meteor shower in the whole universe. Soon after his idea was confirmed to be accurate, Schiaparelli posited that another comet was related to a different annual meteor shower: Comet Tempel-Tuttle with November’s Leonids.

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Technically, the Perseid Meteor Shower can be seen all over the Northern Hemisphere, with shooting stars visible every year from mid-July to late August. This year the shower will reach its peak overnight from 12 to 13 August. This means stargazers can expect to see up to 100 shooting stars every hour – especially those with the best conditions.

Wide open spaces with dark skies make for the best spots to stargaze, and seeing the Perseids is no different. Following the weekend’s full moon, a Waning Gibbous moon is expected to shine in the sky all night long from 12 to 13 August, meaning the conditions this time around are not as perfect as 2024. Last year, a quarter moon set at midnight creating a very dark sky for most of the night, which makes the Perseids easier to spot. In 2025, moonlight may wash out some of the fainter Perseids.

However all is not lost: stargazers hoping to spot the Perseids in 2025 are encouraged to head out from 11pm and keep an eye open until dawn; this is when the meteors will be at their most visible. As always, places with dark skies will offer a better show (think national parks and remote landscapes) – hence why it can be trickier to spot celestial events in London where there’s lots of light pollution. This list of dark sky places highlights some of the best spots in the country. If you are in the capital, consider going to a park like Parliament Hill to the north of the city or Richmond Park in the south west; both are popular locations for meteor-spotting.

While 2025 is not the best year for the Perseids, mark your calendar for 12 August 2028 when the late Finnish astronomer Esko Lyytinen predicts the Perseids will appear as a much larger meteor storm. This is because the planet will be passing more directly through a stream of Comet Swift-Tuttle’s dust, thought to be the debris produced by its 1479 pass by the sun. He wrote in 2000 that around 1,000 meteors per hour, or more, will be visible on that night.