Orionid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight!

An Orionid meteor next to the constellation Orion

The annual Orionid meteor shower is created when Earth passes through trails of comet debris left in space long ago by Halley’s Comet as it orbits around the sun. The meteors, or “shooting stars”, develop when pieces of rock typically no larger than a pea, and mostly the size of a grain of sand, vaporize in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

The constellation Orion rises to the east in the 11-11:30 pm timeframe.  The sky above you on the earth will encounter more meteors after midnight, as your position on the earth rotates around to its leading side as it moves through space rotating the sun.  For 2015, in mid Northern latitudes the first quarter moon (50% full) will set around 12:30 am early in the morning of October 21, so the sky will be darkest for seeing or capturing meteors in photographs from 12:30 am until morning twilight starts around 5:45 am.

This is a composite shot of the best meteors that I caught during the Orionid meteor shower in 2014, over the course of several hours in Central Nevada:

 

Orion is roughly in the center, but you’ll notice that not all of the meteors radiate out from Orion as you might expect.  There are actually additional meteor showers active at this time, including the Northern Taurids and Southern Taurids, rising about 3 hours earlier than the Orionids, so they’re higher in the sky when Orion rises.

I used a star-tracking mount to follow Orion and produce that 2014 composite image, so when I created a time-lapse from the same footage, it turned out like this:

 

For a perspective fixed on the ground with the sky moving, here’s a time-lapse video from chasing the Orionid meteor shower in 2012 in the Mono Basin in the Eastern Sierra:

Where will you pursue this year’s Orionids?

#Orionids #meteorshower #astronomy #astrophotography #nightphotography