The h Virginids meteor shower
Key facts
- Peak
- around 29 April
- Active
- about 18 April to 4 May
- Rate at peak (ZHR)
- very low (detected mainly by video)
- Speed
- about 22 km/s
- Radiant
- Virgo (near Spica)
- Parent body
- Unknown
Dates shift slightly from year to year. This year's peak is in the events calendar, and the meteor-shower planner shows how high the radiant climbs from where you live, night by night.
The h Virginids are a slow, faint shower of late April from the area of Spica in Virgo. They were identified by video cameras in Japan and are one of the few spring showers that is not simply part of the Antihelion Source.
Discovery. In 2009 the Tokyo observer Takashi Kanamori published eleven new showers found in two years of video data from cameras at several sites in Japan. Each meteor seen from two cameras could be traced in three dimensions and given an orbit. The h Virginids were one of these groups, with a radiant within a degree or two of Spica. Showers are normally named after a star close to the radiant, and the lower-case letter comes from the old system of labelling fainter stars with Roman letters once the Greek alphabet had been used up.
The meteors. The meteoroids enter the atmosphere slowly, at only about 22 kilometres per second, so their orbits are not very different from Earth's. Slow meteors look leisurely, with long trails. No parent body has been identified.
What to expect. Very few meteors. The shower overlaps with the end of the Lyrids and with the slow meteors of the Antihelion Source, whose radiant is also in this part of the sky in spring, so picking out h Virginids by eye is almost impossible. Cameras that measure orbits are needed.
Viewing. Spica is close to the celestial equator, so the radiant can be seen from both hemispheres. From the UK it is low in the south around midnight in late April.
Viewing tips
- Find Spica, the bright white star of Virgo, low in the south around midnight.
- Look for slow meteors from near Spica.
- Expect most slow spring meteors to belong to the Antihelion Source.
- Use a video camera to separate members by their orbits.
- Observe on moonless nights in late April.