2020 Orionid meteor shower in the South – look East(ish), then up

If you are looking to catch a glimpse at a few passing meteor streaks, try to find the constellation Orion in the night sky, then look up.

What you’ll see

Head out after midnight, or get up a few hours before the sunrises. You will see about 10 to 20 streaks per hour. These streak do tend to be a bit longer during the Orionid meteor shower, but these may not be as bright or voluminous as other years.

Some background

Orion, rises along the eastern horizon after sundown and will continue to traverse the sky. Find the constellation, then lay flat on your back and look up, allowing your eyes to adjust to the night sky.

Truly, you’ll be able to see streaks across most of the sky in any direction. But looking East may offer the best chance to catch a few a bit easier.

The reason things may not be as bright as other years is due to our relative distance from the Orionid meteor shower’s reason for being – Halley’s Comet.

Not “Hailey’s” Comet, Halley’s Comet. It has been suggested that Bill Haley & His Comets, the band from the 1950s is the common reason the actual comet is mispronounced.

In 1705, Sir Edmund Halley deciphered that the comet was periodic and would make another appearance in 1758. The comet reappeared as predicted and was named after him.

Halley’s Comet is almost as far away from the Sun as it can get right now. It reaches that point in November of 2023, before flying back toward the inner solar system.

What we are seeing in the night sky (and not seeing during the day) is the Earth plowing through through all of the leftover debris from the thousands of years Halley’s comet has been careening around the Sun.

More about Halley’s Comet, from NASA:

1P/Halley is often called the most famous comet because it marked the first time astronomers understood comets could be repeat visitors to our night skies. Astronomers have now linked the comet’s appearances to observations dating back more than 2,000 years.

Halley was last seen in Earth’s skies in 1986 and was met in space by an international fleet of spacecraft. It will return in 2061 on its regular 76-year journey around the Sun.

Until the time of English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742), comets were believed to make only one pass through the solar system.

But in 1705, Halley used Isaac Newton’s theories of gravitation and planetary motions to compute the orbits of several comets. Halley found the similarities in the orbits of bright comets reported in 1531, 1607 and 1682 and he suggested that the trio were actually a single comet making return trips. Halley correctly predicted the comet’s return in 1758-1759 — 16 years after his death — and history’s first known “periodic” comet was later named in his honor.

The comet has since been connected to ancient observations going back more than 2,000 years. It is featured in the famous Bayeux tapestry, which chronicles the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

With each orbit around the Sun, a comet the size of Halley loses an estimated 3 to 10 feet (1 to 3 meters) of material from the surface of its nucleus. Thus, as a comet ages, it eventually dims in appearance and may lose all the ices in its nucleus. The tails disappear at that stage, and the comet finally evolves into a dark mass of rocky material or perhaps dissipates into dust.

Scientists calculate that an average periodic comet lives to complete about 1,000 trips around the Sun. Halley has been in its present orbit for at least 16,000 years, but it has shown no obvious signs of aging in its recorded appearances.

The long history of the Orionid Meteor shower is the reason it is named after Orion, the Hunter, and not Halley’s Comet.

More about Orion, from NASA:

One of the most recognizable constellations in the sky is Orion, the Hunter. Among Orion’s best-known features is the “belt,” consisting of three bright stars in a line, each of which can be seen without a telescope.

The westernmost star in Orion’s belt is known officially as Delta Orionis. (Since it has been observed for centuries by sky-watchers around the world, it also goes by many other names in various cultures, like “Mintaka”.) Modern astronomers know that Delta Orionis is not simply one single star, but rather it is a complex multiple star system.

Delta Orionis is a small stellar group with three components and five stars in total: Delta Ori A, Delta Ori B, and Delta Ori C. Both Delta Ori B and Delta Ori C are single stars and may give off small amounts of X-rays. Delta Ori A, on the other hand, has been detected as a strong X-ray source and is itself a triple star system as shown in the artist’s illustration.

In Delta Ori A, two closely separated stars orbit around each other every 5.7 days, while a third star orbits this pair with a period of over 400 years. The more massive, or primary, star in the closely-separated stellar pair weighs about 25 times the mass of the Sun, whereas the less massive, or secondary star, weighs about ten times the mass of the Sun.