The Perseids Meteor Shower Will Peak In Our Skies Next Week

Getting to grips with stargazing? Regardless of whether you know your Big Dipper from your Little Bear, turning our attention skyward can be mesmerising, grounding and even reduce cortisol. Next week, 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 2026, even the greenest of gazers can catch a glimpse.

What Is 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.

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.

What Is Comet Swift-Tuttle?

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 a century’s time. In 2126, it is thought Comet Swift-Tuttle will pass so close to Earth it will be visible with the naked eye.

The largest near-Earth object known to man, calculations made in the ’90s gave rise to fear that Comet Swift-Tuttle might make impact with Earth one day, on 14 August 2126, to be precise. However, later calculations confirmed there is no threat the Comet will hit Earth in the next 2,000 years. It is predicted there will be a ‘close encounter’ in 4479 – with a one in a million probability of impact – but that’s not worth worrying about for now.

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Time & Date

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. In 2026, the Perseids’ peak coincides with another astronomical event: the partial eclipse. In London, this will begin at 6.18pm on Wednesday 12 August and peak at 7.13pm, when it is thought 91.4 percent of the sun will be hidden behind the moon.

For an eclipse to take place, we need a New Moon, which will plunge the sky into almost total darkness when the sun sets at 8.28pm – perfect viewing conditions for the Perseids which shine brighter against a dark sky. For both, we need to cross our fingers for clear skies, as clouds can mar the view. As we have recently become accustomed to, the weather is forecast to be hot (up to 31°C) on 12 August, and cloudy in the morning though the veil should clear by 8am.

How To See It

Stargazers hoping to spot the Perseids in 2026 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 2026 is not the strongest 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.