How to identify Meteor Shower

[GreyRaptor]

I need some help identifying Meteors.  There are a couple of Meteor showers happening this time of the year, when you see a meteor, how do you know what shower it belongs to?  For example, will a Leonids meteor be traveling from the direction of LEO, or toward LEO, or transiting LEO?  I ask this because I have seen a number of meteors that seem to originate a long ways from the constellation I would assume them to be from and I am considering them to be from another shower.  Thank you for the assistance.

[ronin]

The name indicates where they come from. So a Leonid will appear to come from the region of sky that Leo is in. REGION being the key description.

Concernign the constellation name two options are that the constellation boundries are much bigger then the constellation, the other is simply they had to indicate an area of the sky and what they give is close. Also as the earths orbit moves a little the constellation appears in fractionally different places over time.

A couple of thousand years back the pole star was not Polaris, and in a few thousand it will not be Polaris (name problem then).

Many "showers" are very low in numerical value, seen values of 2 or 3 per hour, I am not sure I would call that a shower.

[Putaendo Patrick]

The American Meteor Society has some useful information on the Internet. Check http://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-shower-calendar/  or a list of the year's major showers, and http://www.amsmeteors.org/category/meteor-showers/  for a more detailed outlook for the next few days.

[LukeSkywatcher]

Not long now til the Geminid meteor shower (in my opinion the best). 4 weeks to go. Look towards the NE (as always). Somewhere between Castor and Pollox is the origin.

Geminids can often put on a very lovely display.

[Ruud]

If a shower of rain were as rich a a meteor shower, the world would be a dry place, so these two examples exaggerate the effect a little.

The first video answers your question. The meteors in it travel toward us from the direction of Gemini:

The second video is just a beautiful meteor video from Canada

more meteor videos here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=meteor+shower+hd