Winter’s arrival at 5:44 a.m. on Wednesday morning is going to be uneventful, as we’ve already been getting plenty of winter weather for the last several weeks. Temperatures have dropped to the teens in some Island places and we’ve already seen snow. The good news is that though nights are long, the evidence of change is ahead. Daylight will soon get longer.

A well placed but often forgotten meteor shower, the Ursid Meteor Shower, takes place in the early hours of Thursday morning, just after first day of Winter. The meteors appear to come out of the constellation we know as the Little Dipper, or Ursa Minor. One can expect to see less than 10 meteors in an hour of watching, under the most ideal conditions, but there have been some surprises, like a burst meteor.

While astronomers forecast the best of show is when most are asleep Thursday morning, you could be outside Wednesday night and see a meteor or two or three or more.

There are about a dozen meteor showers a year that are watched by amateur astronomers and this one is the least known, mostly because it is cold outside. But the shower is conveniently placed in the sky. The Little Dipper is one of the easy constellations to find. The North Star, Polaris, resides at the end of the handle of the dipper. The meteors will appear to radiate from this constellation.