Alpha Capricornids meteor shower 2026 and 2027

What the Alpha Capricornids are

The Alpha Capricornids are a minor shower active through July and into August. The International Astronomical Union’s Meteor Data Center associates them with comet 169P/NEAT, a periodic comet. As Earth passes through the old trail of dust along that comet’s orbit, grains strike the atmosphere and burn up as meteors.

The radiant, the point the meteors seem to come from, sits in Capricornus, a dim constellation low in the southern sky on summer nights. The shower is named after Alpha Capricorni, a star near that point.

What they look like

Speed is what sets this shower apart. Alpha Capricornids enter the atmosphere at well under half the speed of a Perseid, so they cross the sky slowly and look almost lazy by comparison. The International Meteor Organization (IMO) notes that bright meteors are frequent and that some reach fireball class.

The American Meteor Society defines a fireball as a meteor brighter than about magnitude −4, roughly the brightness of Venus. (On the magnitude scale, lower numbers mean brighter objects.) Even a few slow, bright meteors in a night make this shower memorable, though the total count stays low.

How to watch from the US

Capricornus is a summer constellation that rises in the southeast in the evening and is highest in the south around midnight to 1 a.m. daylight time in late July. That is the core of our best-hours window for each city. The radiant is only moderately south of the celestial equator, so the shower works from every part of the US, not just the southern states.

Choose a site with a dark southern horizon, lie back, and look about halfway up the sky. Because so few meteors come from this shower, you need to sort them from others. Slow speed is the giveaway. IMO says the low velocity lets observers distinguish Alpha Capricornids from the antihelion source, a broad, weak spread of meteors that comes from the region of sky opposite the Sun and overlaps the same area in July. The faster Southern Delta Aquariids come from a radiant a little farther east in Aquarius, and Perseids streak in from the northeast.

Notable history

The Alpha Capricornids have no record of storms. IMO says minor rises in rate have been reported a few times, but the highest observed ZHR (zenithal hourly rate, the count expected under ideal dark skies with the radiant overhead) was about 10, in 1995. IMO adds that some recent results put the maximum on July 30 or 31.

2026 and 2027 outlook

2026 (past). IMO noted that the end-of-July maximum fell close to the full Moon of July 29, so moonlight hampered observations.

2027. IMO lists the maximum around July 31 and expects no moonlight interference at the end of July. A dark late-July night lets you watch this shower, the Delta Aquariids and the rising Perseids together. See the 2027 calendar for the other showers that year.