Orionids!
[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:
Don’t forget the Orionids over the next night or two (peaking late tonight, the wee hours of Sunday morning). As the name implies, look for them coming from Orion, although even if you don’t know exactly where that is, you’ll see them almost anywhere you look in the sky if you’ve enough dark. Recall that Orion has those three bright equally spaced stars in a line, making up his belt. I spoke about this, and gave more directions about the Orionids in a post last year.
There’s a Space.com piece by Joe Rao with more discussion. About sightings, it says:
Expect to see few, if any Orionids before midnight – especially this year, with a bright waxing gibbous Moon glaring high in the western sky.
But moonset is around 1:30 a.m. local daylight time on Sunday, and that’s a good time to begin preparing for your meteor vigil. At its best several hours later, at around 5:00 a.m. when Orion is highest in the sky toward the south, Orionids typically produce around 20 to 25 meteors per hour under a clear, dark sky.
Today’s StarDate (as usual, read on NPR by the wonderful Sandy Wood) has a piece on it too. Here’s an extract from the transcript (written by Damond Benningfield):
