ON ANY clear night, if you're looking in the right direction at the right time, you can see a shooting star skipping across the sky once every half hour or so. They're zipping about all the time. But we can't predict exactly when and where they'll appear. On some nights, though, we can predict exactly that, and one of those nights is coming up.
Overnight on October 20/21 Earth will move through a stream of debris left behind by Halley's Comet during its many trips around the Sun. There's no danger from this 'meteor shower' - we won't be pelted with space rocks - but we will see more shooting stars than usual as grains of dust from the comet burn up in the atmosphere.
To see the meteor shower at its best you'll need to be somewhere dark after midnight on the 20th, somewhere with a good view of a lot of the sky too. Because the shooting stars will appear to zip out of the constellation of Orion in the sky, this meteor shower is called the Orionids. Unfortunately, a bright Moon will be close to Orion that evening, cutting down the number of meteors we will see. But if you can stay out for a while you will definitely see more shooting stars than usual.
Stuart Atkinson
Eddington Astronomical Society of Kendal
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