NIGHT WATCH

4 January

Fancy bathing in a meteor shower? With luck, you’ll be able to catch it this month. The Quadrantid shower appears in the hours before dawn on 4 January and has been known to produce between 50-100 meteors an hour, but its peak is short and sweet. To spot it, you need to be in a dark sky area in the Northern Hemisphere after the waxing crescent moon leaves the sky – that’s between midnight and dawn. There’s every chance the sky will reward you with an exhilarating show.