The Orionids are an annual meteor shower caused by debris left by Halley’s comet in its journey around the Sun. <\/p>\n
Every year, Earth passes through the comet dust and the debris burns with the friction caused by the atmosphere, creating a bright streak of light through the sky.<\/p>\n
The Orionids are fast and bright, entering our atmosphere with speeds of around 41 miles per second. They can often produce long glowing trails and fireballs. <\/p>\n
To spot them, find a dark spot with wide open skies, away from city light pollution and let your eyes adjust to the night sky for 20 minutes. <\/p>\n
The meteors are visible to the naked eye so you won’t need any specialist equipment like binoculars or a telescope.<\/p>\n
The meteors will appear to originate from the constellation of Orion, near the red supergiant star Betelgeuse. This is known as the radiant. <\/p>\n
Between midnight and dawn the constellation will climb higher in the sky to the south and then the south-west. <\/p>\n
It is best to view the meteors slightly away from the radiant as they will be more visible.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the Moon will be in the waxing gibbous phase on the night of the 21 October, throwing extra light into the night sky and reducing visibility. <\/p>\n
However, conditions will improve once the Moon sets around 03:00 BST on Thursday morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Orionids are an annual meteor shower caused by debris left by Halley’s comet in its journey around…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":809491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-809490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}