Orionid Meteor Shower Underway, Peaks October 20-21

If you'd like to see some shooting stars, you'll have an excellent chance on the next few nights as the Orionid meteor shower increases in intensity, peaking on the night of October 20-21. Orionid meteors are created from the dust left behind from Halley's Comet as it orbits the sun. They meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, but they appear to radiate out from the constellation Orion, which rises to the east around 11-11:30 local time.

There's a possible minor peak in the shower reported on October 17-18 as well, so I'll go out tonight in a couple of hours when Orion has cleared the horizon, and see if I can see any activity.

I created this image tonight from a sequence of a few hundred photos I captured on the night of October 20-21, 2012. The constellation Orion rose above the horizon near the lower left corner of this 14 mm view, and it traveled to the upper right corner before dawn arrived. I created a time-lapse video of this meteor shower as well, and I'll put that in a blog post so you can see it.

See my Orionid meteor shower time-lapse video on YouTube: http://activesole.blogspot.com/2012/10/orionid-meteor-shower-2012-time-lapse.html
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