{"id":399775,"date":"2026-04-15T13:21:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/399775\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T13:21:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:21:08","slug":"lyrid-meteor-shower-2026-when-and-how-to-watch-it-this-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/399775\/","title":{"rendered":"Lyrid meteor shower 2026: When and how to watch it this week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Lyrids are not the only meteor shower to visit our skies in April.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Eta Aquarids will also be active between 9 April to 28 May, with the peak in the early hours of 6 May 2026. The average rate is around 40 an hour.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">They are named after a star called Eta Aquarii in the Aquarius constellation, which is the point from which it appears to originate and created from the trail of the Comet 1P\/Halley. This takes considerably less time than Comet Thatcher to compete its solar orbit &#8211; between  75-76 years. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Halley is one of the most well known and best studied by scientists. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The comet will be back again in 2061 but in the meantime we can enjoy the bi-annual meteor showers as its dust particles create passing through the Earth&#8217;s atmosphere, not only giving us the Eta Aquarids in April but also the Orionids in October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Lyrids are not the only meteor shower to visit our skies in April. The Eta Aquarids will&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":{"0":"post-399775","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}