The Orionids

These nights, if you stay up late enough, the easily recognisable  constellation Orion is visible. And on October 21-22, this constellation is the radiant of the annual Orionid meteor shower. While the Orionids aren’t one of the better known meteor showers, everyone has heard of the comet that creates them. It’s none other than the famous Halley’s Comet. The rate of meteors is quite small for this shower, about 10 to 15 per hour. But it is known to sometimes produce spectacular fireballs. And the good news is that this year the moon shouldn’t cause any problems with viewing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 11:23 am and is filed under Meteor Showers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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