Taurid Meteor Shower

I totally get that.  I live in town so it's hard seeing all but the brightest of meteorites.  Even if you can get out in the country away from lights so you can see them better, they aren't a constant shower of meteorites like people probably imagine.  It's one here and there, and if you blink you miss it.  You may wait several minutes before seeing one.

It's kinda like how far off we are when we think about asteroids in the asteroid belt.  I think we typically imagine something like this:


The reality is that asteroids in the asteroid belt are so far apart that if you enter the belt you wouldn't even realize it. Even though there are millions to billions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, they are still so far apart that the average distance between them is 600,000 miles. For comparison, Earth has a diameter of 7,917 miles and is 24,900 miles around the equator, and the moon is 238,900 miles from Earth. That means the distance between asteroids in the asteroid belt is so great that it's 2.5 times the distance between the Earth and the moon.

Likewise, we imagine a meteor shower being something where we can look up and see meteorites streaking across the sky constantly, but the reality is they're much farther apart than that. Even though we get more meteorites than we normally would outside of a meteor shower, they're not so frequent that we constantly see them.

if their so far apart how do they know its a belt of them?

Now this is an interesting one.

People have been observing the heavens for all of human history, but for virtually all of that we've looked up at objects in the night sky with absolutely no idea what we were looking at.  People came up with ideas and religions often surrounded celestial bodies, but it wasn't until more modern times that we had equipment to really aid our understanding of what twinkles in the night sky.  In time we figured out what planets really were and made observations of their orbits and distances.  Based on what we knew of the planets, hundreds of years ago great minds started figuring that there really should be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, but we knew of none. 

Eventually, a little over 200 years ago, Ceres was discovered in that region, and it was accepted as the planet between Mars and Jupiter.  Soon thereafter Pallas was also discovered in that same orbit.  They noticed, however, that no matter how much they zoomed in on it, it remained a tiny blip of light, unlike the other planets.  Thus it was decided that they couldn't be planets and a new classification was created: asteroid.

Okay, we have two asteroids.  How did that turn into a belt?  Further study of that region resulted in two more asteroids discovered: Juno and Vesta.  Now we have four, all in approximately the same orbit.  Within half a century over a hundred were known.  By the early 1900s it was up to over a thousand.  The more we discovered, the more evident it was that there were simply a lot of rocks floating there.  By the year 2000 over 100,000 asteroids were discovered.

There wasn't ever a point where people looked through a telescope and saw a cluster of asteroids.  It just took centuries of patience and observation to find them one at a time and observing them to reside within the same region of our solar system.

Wow. Its amazing how vast our solar system is.