The Orionid meteor shower, one of the year’s fastest, peaks on the night of October 21–22. The Svábhegyi Observatory forecasts around 15 meteors per hour at its maximum under ideal conditions, though that rate isn’t guaranteed. Your best chance to see them comes before dawn, after the bright Moon sets at about 2:30 a.m.
The Moon will make the first part of the night harder for meteor watching. The Orionids’ radiant, the point in the sky from which the meteors appear to spread, rises before 10 p.m. on October 21. The waxing Moon will be 79 percent illuminated then, and its light will make meteors harder to spot. By 5 a.m., the radiant will be 59 degrees above the horizon and the Moon will have set, leaving darker skies. The observatory recommends looking toward the southern sky, where around 15 meteors per hour may be visible near dawn.
You don’t need a telescope. The observatory recommends watching with the naked eye, which lets you take in a wider area of sky at once. Rather than looking directly at the constellation Orion, turn your gaze farther away, ideally to areas about 45–135 degrees from the radiant. This can reveal longer meteor trails and improve your chances of spotting the flashes.
The Orionids move fast. Their meteors enter Earth’s atmosphere at about 66 kilometers per second, or roughly 240,000 kilometers per hour, and usually cross the sky in less than a second.
The particles behind the shower come from debris left by 1P/Halley. Earth crosses the comet’s path twice a year: the October encounter produces the Orionids, while the same debris creates the Eta Aquariids in early May 2027.
Halley’s Comet is one of the best-known periodic comets. It travels around the Sun on an elliptical orbit that takes about 76 years. It last passed close to the Sun in 1986, and its next return is expected in 2061. The comet itself is rarely visible, but its dust appears in the night sky every autumn, the Svábhegyi Observatory notes.
A photograph accompanying the source coverage shows the 2025 meteor shower in China. Photo: Xue Bing/VCG via Getty Images.
