Lyrid Meteor Shower 2013: Partly Obscured By the Moon But 'Occasional Surprises' Keep It 'Interesting'

The annual Lyrid meteor shower peaked from late Sunday night into the early hours of Monday morning. It will continue to be visible until April 26.

The meteor shower happens every year during the middle of April when Earth passes through a trail of dusty debris from the Comet Thatcher, which is a comet that makes an orbit around the sun once every 415 years, according to Space.com. Astronomers, both avid and amateur, have been watching the Lyrid meteor shower for at least 2,600 years.

The meteors are thought to come from the constellation Lyra, from which the shower gets its name.

"Vega is a brilliant blue-white star about three times wider than our Sun and 25 light years away," according to spaceweather.com.

It usually has to be a clear night for the shower to be visible, though in rural areas with dark skies, about 15 to 20 meteors can be seen in an hour.

This year, the moon is in its gibbous phase, which illuminates 85 percent of the lunar disk in the night sky, leaving only the brightest meteors visible. The moonlight washes out the fainter meteors, so a brighter moon means less of the shower is visible to stargazers.

The earliest records of the Lyrid meteor shower come from Chinese astronomers in 687 BC, according to UniverseToday.com.

"At midnight, stars dropped down like rain," is a famous statement about the meteor shower thought to have been said by mathematician Johann Gottfried Galle in 1867. Galle and Edmond Weiss noticed the link between the Lyrids and the Comet Thatcher six years prior to the statement. Prior to that, in the early to mid-19^th century, the idea that comets and meteor showers were linked was hotly debated.

"From one until three, those starry meteors seemed to fall from every point in the sky heavens, in such numbers as to resemble a shower of sky rockets," read a letter to the Virginia Gazette in 1803, describing one of the most famous account of a Lyrid meteor shower.

Apparently the shower was more active in the past and has since evolved into a minor display," notes Universe Today. "But there have been occasional surprises, and that's what keeps the Lyrid interesting."