The Orionids meteor shower peaks October 21-22, 2026, and every shooting star you catch is a leftover from Halley's Comet. Tell the calculator how dark your sky is, and it will tell you how many wishes you're allowed.
The Orionids are the leftovers of the most famous comet in history. Halley's Comet last swung through the inner solar system in 1986 and will return in 2061, but it left a 40-million-kilometer trail of dust along its orbit. Every October, Earth plows straight through that trail, and the debris slams into the atmosphere at 66 kilometers per second — about a hundred times faster than a rifle bullet. Each grain burns up in a tenth of a second. You call it a shooting star.
The shower peaks on October 21-22, 2026, when Earth reaches the densest part of the stream. The rate is modest by meteor-shower standards — around 20 meteors per hour under perfect skies, versus the Perseids' 100 — but the Orionids have two things going for them. First, the meteors are fast and bright, many leaving persistent trains that hang in the sky for a few seconds. Second, the Moon sets before midnight on the peak nights, leaving the sky as dark as it is going to get. That combination makes October 22 before dawn one of the best skywatching windows of the year.
Your latitude matters more than you'd think. The radiant — the point the meteors appear to stream from — sits near Orion's club, at declination +16°. The higher it climbs in your sky, the more meteors you see, because fewer are hidden below your horizon. From mid-northern latitudes the radiant soars overhead in the early hours. From Sydney it still climbs respectably high. The only unlucky seats are the far polar regions, where the radiant barely rises.
And the real plot twist: every grain you see tonight left Halley's Comet during one of its past 76-year circuits. The oldest ones may have been shed centuries ago, slowly spreading out until Earth finally ran into them. You are not watching a comet. You are watching its autobiography, published one burning speck at a time.
Halley's Comet sheds dust every time it heats up near the Sun, and that dust spreads along its orbit like breadcrumbs. The Orionids are the breadcrumb trail Earth crosses every October. The same comet also produces the Eta Aquariids in May — so Halley gives you two showers a year from opposite sides of its orbit.
About 66 km/s — among the fastest of any annual shower. That speed is why Orionid meteors tend to be bright and can leave glowing trails called persistent trains. The faster the impact, the more energy released as light when the grain vaporizes at 80-100 km up.
After midnight on October 22, ideally 2-5 a.m. local time, when your part of Earth is facing into the meteor stream head-on and the radiant is high. On the peak nights the Moon sets before midnight, so the post-midnight sky is dark. Give your eyes 20 minutes to adapt, look roughly toward Orion, and be patient — the gaps between meteors can feel long even at the peak.
Enormously. A Bortle 4 sky shows maybe half the meteors a Bortle 1 sky does; a city center shows one-tenth or worse. The meteors themselves are unaffected — they burn up at 100 km regardless — but your eyes can't see the faint ones through city glow. Drive 30 minutes out of town and the count can triple. The calculator's light-pollution factors come from the standard Bortle observing scale.