2012 Quadrantids meteor shower expected today

The 2012 Quadrantids meteor shower is expected to peak, according to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center on Wednesday, January 4, early in the morning.

Although not as famous as the Perseids meteor shower, the Quadrantids shower will nonetheless offer up “excellent meteor observing” from about 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. local time (regardless of the time zone you’re in), according to NASA.

Named after a now-extinct constellation, the shower is expected to produce 60 to 200 meteors per hour, with an average rate of about 100 each hour, according to NASA.

Meteor shower “viewing should be great over most of the country,” Weather Channel meteorologist Mark Ressler told USA Today. Exceptions are potentially cloudy spots in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes and parts of the Northeast.

The Quadrantids shower was first seen in 1825, according to NASA.

“Dynamical studies suggest that this body could very well be a piece of a comet which broke apart several centuries ago, and that the meteors you will see before dawn on Jan. 4 are the small debris from this fragmentation,” said the space agency’s website.

“After hundreds of years orbiting the sun, they will enter our atmosphere at 90,000 mph, burning up 50 miles above Earth’s surface – a fiery end to a long journey!”

Only the Northern Hemisphere will be able to see the Quadrantids meteor show, NASA says.