The meteors appear to radiate from an area inside the constellation Boötes. The name comes from Quadrans Muralis, an obsolete constellation that is now part of Boötes.
The parent body of the Quadrantids was recently tentatively identified (in a paper by Peter Jenniskens (http://ephemeris.sjaa.net/0401/e.html)) as the minor planet 2003 EH1, which in turn may be the same object as the comet C/1490 Y1 which was observed by Chinese, Japanese and Korean astronomers 500 years ago.
The best date to view the Quadrantids is January 3rd, although they can viewed from the 1st through 5th. The peak hours are from nightfall to midnight.
The Quadrantid shower is hard to observe because the radiant is in lower culmination at midnight.
The Quadrantids end as high in the atmosphere as the Lyrid meteors with similar entry speed but originating from a known comet, and higher than Geminid meteoroids, which have been sintered by a small perihelion distance, appearing more asteroid-like and penetrate deeper in the atmopshere.
The identification of the Quadrantid parent was announced on an IAU Circular on December 08.
The shower's radiant is located high in the Northern sky, so the Quadrantids are visible mainly to observers in the Northern hemisphere where the weather is cold and often stormy in January.
If this is true, then we might expect to see outbursts of Quadrantidmeteors during years when the parent comet is nearby, just as the well-known Leonid meteors are especially intense around the time that their parent comet, Tempel-Tuttle, passes close to Earth.
The NASA Star Trails Society invites you to observe the Quadrantids and to submit your observations for analysis by scientists studying the meteor shower.
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