Over the next few nights if we are lucky and have a clear night we should be able to see the Orionids. The Orionids Shower should produce 20 to 25 meteors an hour at its peak on Wednesday night. They should be fairly easy to spot thanks to a moonless midnight sky.

The meteor shower gets it’s name as the meteors appear to radiate from near the Orion constellation (the hunter). Orion has an hour glass shape and a belt of stars across the middle. The best time to see the Orionids will be after midnight as Orion will rise at around 11pm.

The Orionids are created by small particles that circle through the solar system in the orbit of Halley’s comet.  A comet has a mass that is made up of a fifty fifty combination of ice and rock. As a comet passes though our inner solar system the heat from the sun melts some of the ice and so some rock fragments no longer held by the ice fall off.  As this dust stream intersects the Earths orbit the dust fragments hit the upper atmosphere creating meteors.

These fragments are usually no bigger than a grain of sand. Some times they travel together in clumps held together by gravity.  The clumps form when the comet is near the sun. This means that in the years that the comet is close to the Earth and the sun, the meteor showers are more spectacular. Halley’s comet is at its furthest point from the Sun (and Earth) so it is unlikely that we would expect a clump with the Orionids this time round. That said if we get a clear night on Wednesday we should be able to see a good show. Clear skies are unfortunately not guaranteed over Ireland. There was a lot of cloud cover for the Perseids meteor shower but luckily a patch of cloud opened up in the right spot and just long enough for me to see three meteors. Sometimes even on a cloudy night you can get a lucky break.