EARTH · METEOR MAP
Where Last Night’s Meteors Streaked
Every night, a worldwide grid of low-light cameras — the Global Meteor Network— watches the sky and triangulates the meteors that flash across it. This map places each one where it streaked, coloured by how bright it flared: radar-green for the faint ones the cameras only just catch, up to red for a true fireball. Tap any meteor for its shower, speed and the moment it fell. It is the most recent completed night— sourced, dated, and never dressed up as “right now.”
What the colours mean
Every dot is tinted by the meteor’s peak brightness, measured as an absolute magnitude (the scale runs backwards — a lower number is a brightermeteor). A fireball, by the astronomers’ convention, is anything at least as bright as magnitude −4 — roughly Venus or brighter. Most of what the cameras catch is fainter than the naked eye would notice.
New to how this works? A short field guide unpacks the words — meteoroid, meteor, meteorite — and why some meteors scream in at 70 km/s while others drift:
How a camera network catches a meteor
Volunteers around the world run small low-light video cameras pointed at the night sky. When two or more of them, tens of kilometres apart, see the samemeteor, its path can be triangulated in three dimensions — giving a real ground track, height, speed and orbit.
From the reconstructed orbit the network can tell whether a meteor belonged to a known shower or was a one-off sporadic, how fast it entered the atmosphere, and how bright it flared. Each dot on the map carries all of that.
See it in context
When the big showers peak, where their radiants sit, and how many to expect — the forecast to this map’s record.
SKY · “WHAT DID I SEE?”Fireballs & reentries near youWas that a meteor or a falling satellite? The per-city identifier for the very brightest events.
SKY · TONIGHTWhat’s up over your city →About this data
Meteors come from the Global Meteor Network, an open, volunteer-run collaboration whose data is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence. We read the network’s latest daily trajectory summary— the most recent completed observing night, which the network publishes a few hours after the night ends. That means this map is fresh, but it is nota live feed of meteors falling this instant: the stamp always shows the night the data is from. We plot only meteors with a real, triangulated ground position and a measured brightness, and we show each one with the time it was seen. Coverage follows the cameras — denser where the network is denser (Europe, North America, Australasia). If the feed is briefly unreachable we show a recent night’s snapshot rather than an empty map, always labelled with its date.