A meteor shower named for a dragon once produced several thousand shooting stars an hour in 1946 — and its parent comet is nearing the sun again in 2026, though nowhere near as close to Earth as it's been

A meteor shower named for a dragon once produced several thousand shooting stars an hour in 1946 — and its parent comet is nearing the sun again in 2026, though nowhere near as close to Earth as it's been

On the night of 9 October 1946, observers across parts of Europe and North America watched the sky above the constellation Draco erupt. The Draconid meteor shower, an otherwise unremarkable early-October display that in most years produces a handful of meteors per hour, reached a zenithal hourly rate estimated at somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000, depending on the source. It was the second of the shower’s two great storms in the twentieth centu…