Month: October 2019

If you’ve seen balls of fire falling from the sky recently, don’t be alarmed.  It’s the annual Orionid meteor shower, peaking this week.  Best viewing time this year is likely 11 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. on Monday and Tuesday nights.  

The Orionids are flecks of dust and rock left over from Halley’s Comet.  Think of it as a long, long trail of flotsam left in the wake of the comet, spread out all along its orbit.  Halley’s Comet only swoops around the Earth once every 75 years, but every year, we pass through these scraps of it.  

More info here at Space.com.  Happy viewing.

(The image above, by the way, is a rendering of the Leonids, not the Orionids:  “Leonid Meteor Storm, as seen over North America on the night of November 12-13, 1833,” by E. Weiß in Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt, 1988.)