The sky on your birthday

Not a poetic stretch — a definition. A meteor is what you see when a piece of rock or dust hits the atmosphere and burns; a fireball is a meteor brighter than Venus; a bolide is a fireball that explodes before it gets to the ground. The difference between the streak you wish on and the ones listed here is size, not kind.

Most of what you see during a meteor shower is smaller than a grain of rice. The events on this page were metres across, and they released enough energy breaking up that instruments in orbit measured the flash from space. That is why there is a catalogue of them at all: they are bright enough to be seen from outside the atmosphere, and rare enough that each one gets a row.

Eclipses come from the Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses and its lunar companion, computed by Fred Espenak and Jean Meeus and published by NASA — 11,898 solar and 12,064 lunar eclipses between 2000 BCE and 3000 CE. They are calculations, not observations, which is why they extend into the future as confidently as into the past.

Fireballs come from NASA/JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, which publishes atmospheric impact events detected by US government sensors. It starts in 1988, because that is when the sensors that notice them did.

Meteor showers come from the IAU Meteor Data Center's list of established showers. Showers are catalogued by the position of the Earth in its orbit rather than by date, because the date shifts with the leap-year cycle; the peaks here are converted from that position, and a shower's real maximum wanders a day either side from year to year anyway.