June Bootids Peak June 20 as Morning Meteor Rates Reach 12 an Hour

Q: Why is one of the year's strongest meteor showers invisible, and how can a simple FM radio be used to 'hear' it?

One of the year’s strongest showers, the Daytime Arietids, is effectively invisible because it peaks in daylight. Its radiant lies close to the Sun, so when the shower is most active the sky is already bright enough to wash out nearly all meteors. A few very bright Arietids can sometimes be caught in the last dark stretch before sunrise, low in the eastern sky, but the best visual conditions never coincide with the shower’s peak. That is why the Arietids are known mainly from radar and radio observations rather than naked-eye watching. Despite being hard to see, they are strong: radio and radar counts often indicate rates of roughly 60 meteors an hour, and sometimes much higher. A simple FM radio can detect them through meteor scatter. When a meteoroid burns up high in the atmosphere, it leaves a brief trail of ionized gas. That trail can reflect VHF radio waves, including FM signals. If you tune an FM receiver to a normally silent frequency linked to a powerful transmitter hundreds of kilometers away, a meteor can briefly bounce that distant signal to your radio. What you hear is a short burst of audio, a ping, a hiss, or a fragment of a far-off station. The usual setup is an FM radio, a quiet frequency, and a distant transmitter roughly 500 to 2,000 kilometers away. Each sudden burst is a meteor echo. For the Arietids, this radio method is often the most practical way to experience one of the strongest showers of the year.

3 articles · Updated · American Meteor Society · Jun 20

Morning skies offer the week’s best viewing, with total meteor rates near 8 an hour at 45°N and 12 at 25°S, while evening rates stay around 3 to 4.
First-quarter moonlight on June 21 will increasingly cut visibility after midnight as the waxing gibbous moon moves into the morning sky.
June Bootids reach maximum activity on June 20, but the shower is expected to remain weak at under 1 meteor per hour despite favorable northern viewing.
Most other active showers—including the Anthelion source, delta Piscids and phi Piscids—also stay below 1 an hour, leaving sporadic meteors to make up most of the visible activity.
Dark rural skies and pre-dawn observing remain crucial, with urban light and moonlight likely to erase many of the faint meteors from these mostly Class IV minor showers.