Celestial Events Calendar: Eclipses & Meteor Showers

Celestial Events Calendar: Eclipses & Meteor Showers: how it works

The celestial events calendar lists all upcoming solar and lunar eclipses and meteor shower nights that are well visible from the Netherlands and Belgium. For meteor showers, only nights with favourable conditions make the list: a dark moon and a high magnitude, so you don't end up waiting under a moonlit sky or for a weak shower. Click an event and you jump straight to that moment on the map in the Sun, Moon & Milky Way Planner.

Why not every meteor shower is on here

There are dozens of meteor showers every year, but most are weak or coincide with a full moon that washes out the sky too much to see anything. This calendar only picks the nights where conditions happen to line up well: a shower with a decent magnitude, at a time when the moon is low or barely lit. That means well-known showers like the Perseids or Geminids don't appear the same way every year, it depends on that particular year's moon phase.

Eclipses work differently: they're always included when visible from the Netherlands or Belgium, regardless of conditions, because a full or partial eclipse is rare enough on its own to be worth planning for.

Preparing for an event

Click an event and the Sun, Moon & Milky Way Planner opens at that exact time, with the sun or moon position already set. Enter your own location to see which direction you'll need to shoot and whether a building, tree or hill gets in the way.

For meteor showers, it helps to be on location well before the peak. Your eyes need at least twenty minutes to adjust to the dark, and the best shots usually combine an interesting foreground with the night sky behind it.