Alas, we are generally not open for meteor showers. There are several reasons for this:
Meteor showers are best viewed very late at night, after midnight and later. The observatory has very few staff, and so we rely heavily on volunteers to put on events. As you might imagine, it’s often hard to get staff or volunteers with day jobs to agree to set up and run an event that happens in the wee hours of the morning well before dawn.
Meteor showers are best viewed without any optical aid at all. The observatory has a lot of telescopes but they are literally useless for watching meteors, which appear without warning in all parts of the sky and only appear for an instant. It is impossible to point a telescope at a meteor in time to see it, and if you just try to point a telescope at some random patch of sky, hoping for a meteor to pass through the field of view, you’ll likely be totally disappointed. Meteors are best watched with the naked eye where you have an unobstructed view of a large chunk of the sky.
Meteor showers are best viewed far away from light pollution. Some times you will read in the news about meteor showers coming up that breathlessly promise 25, 50, 100 or more meteors per hour. It’s important to know that those numbers represent an ideal case where (a) the observer is far away from any lights (in astronomer parlance, where you can see stars down to 6th magnitude), and (b) where the meteors are near the zenith, directly overhead (and so minimizing atmospheric absorption of their light). At our observatory, there is obviously a great deal of light pollution from UCF itself and from the general Orlando area, so we get skies that are nowhere near as dark. Watching a meteor shower on the observatory lawn will pretty much guarantee that you’ll see way, way fewer meteors than the predictions say.