The sky will be alive with activity tonight! The Orionid meteor shower is about to be at it’s most active tonight!
The Orionids are considered a major meteor shower based on the amount of visible meteors that can be seen streaking across the sky! The Orionids runs from around the first week of October to the first week of November.
FUN FACT: The constellation Orion — where shower gets its name because the meteors point back to a spot in Orion known as the radiant point.
The American Meteor Society says that the meteors per hour may be visible this week, with that number increasing to as many as 20 per hour during the peak on Oct. 20 and Oct. 21.
The Orionids are really just bits of dust and debris left behind from famed Halley’s Comet from its previous trips through the inner solar system. All that cosmic debris and grime slams into the upper atmosphere and burns up in a display we see on the ground as shooting stars and even maybe a fireball.
If you blink, you might miss it! As the Orionids enter our atmosphere at an extremely fast velocity of roughly 147,000 miles per hour (66 kilometers per second). That said, a fair amount of these meteors leave persistent trails that last for a few seconds. Some even fragment and break up in a more spectacular fashion.
Tips for the meteor shower. Find a spot away from light pollution with a wide open view of the night sky. Bundle up if needed, lay back, relax and let your eyes adjust. You don’t need to focus on any part of the sky, but the Orionids are so named because their trails appear to originate from the same general area of the sky as the constellation Orion.
The absolute best time to look for the Orionids in 2020 is probably in the early morning hours before dawn on Oct. 21, but this shower is known for an extended peak, so you should have a good chance of seeing some meteors if you get up early a few days before or after that peak date as well.
Here’s a positive, the moon will set before peak morning viewing hours, so that’ s a perk to beautiful viewing!
