This week, the Orionid meteor shower peaks on the night of October 20-21. The chart shows the view looking south-east from London at 03:00 BST on the morning of October 21, by which time the meteor shower’s radiant tip will have risen high into the sky.
At their best, the Orionids are a moderate shower with maximum rates of between 10 and 20 meteors per hour. This year the moon will have been full on October 17, so it will be a waning gibbous on the evening of the peak. This will wash out the fainter meteors, reducing the numbers.
Nevertheless, the shower is worth watching because the Orionides move quickly and often leave persistent trails in the sky. Sometimes they also produce bright fireballs.
They are called the Orionids because they seem to radiate from a patch of sky in the constellation known as Orion, the hunter. The dust particles themselves that burn up to create the meteors come from the tail of the famous Halley’s comet, which was named after Edmund Halley, who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries. Halley, which was last seen in 1986 and would not return until 2061, was the first comet to be recognized as periodic, meaning it returns to Earth’s sky regularly.
