Orionid Meteor Shower 2026: When It Peaks and How to Watch

Every October, Earth plows through a stream of dust shed by Halley's Comet — the most famous comet in history — and the grains burn up in our atmosphere as the Orionid meteor shower. The comet itself last visited in 1986 and won't return until 2061, so for now these meteors are the closest encounter with it any of us gets. The shower is active from about October 2 to November 7, 2026, but it builds to a broad peak on the night of Wednesday, October 21 into Thursday, October 22.

Orionids are fast. The debris strikes the atmosphere at roughly 66 kilometres per second (about 41 miles per second), which makes the meteors swift and often bright, and NASA notes that some leave glowing trains that hang in the sky for several seconds. A few become fireballs — the kind of streak that makes a whole group of people gasp at once. Expect the radiant, the point the meteors appear to stream from, near the bright star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion.

Set expectations honestly and the night gets better, not worse. Under ideal conditions — a truly dark site, no Moon, the radiant high overhead — the Orionids produce around 20 meteors per hour at peak, and typical dark-sky counts run about 10 to 20 per hour. From a suburb, cut that substantially; from a city centre, you may catch only the occasional fireball. This is a patience event, not a fireworks show: the pleasure is in the quiet, the cold air, and the streaks arriving on their own schedule.

The shower's peak is a plateau rather than a spike, which is good news if clouds intervene. Activity stays worthwhile for several nights around the maximum — roughly October 20 to 24 — so a ruined peak night is not a ruined shower. Check the sky where you are on the [live map](/) before committing to a long drive, and treat a clear October 22 or 23 as a perfectly good second chance.

This year's peak comes with a catch. The Moon is in its waxing gibbous phase, around 80 percent illuminated, and it will wash out the fainter meteors for the first part of the night. The full Hunter's Moon follows on October 26, so there is no escaping moonlight this week — only timing around it.

The workaround is built into the Moon's own schedule: it sets a few hours after midnight, leaving a dark window of roughly three hours before dawn. That window is when the Orionids do their best work anyway, because the radiant climbs highest in the sky in the pre-dawn hours. The practical plan for 2026 is simple: sleep early, set an alarm for after moonset, and watch from then until the sky starts to pale. If you only watch one stretch of the night, make it that one.

You need no equipment at all — telescopes and binoculars actually hurt, because meteors cross huge areas of sky and a narrow field of view misses most of them. NASA's guidance is disarmingly low-tech: lie flat on your back, in the Northern Hemisphere with your feet pointing roughly southeast, and take in as much sky as you can. Counter-intuitively, don't stare at Orion itself. Meteors seen 45 to 90 degrees away from the radiant show longer trails and are easier to catch.

Give your eyes up to 30 minutes to fully adapt to the dark, and protect that adaptation — one glance at a bright phone screen costs you minutes of sensitivity. Dress warmer than the thermometer suggests, because you will be lying still, and bring a reclining chair or a blanket rather than standing with a cricked neck. The space layer crowd has a ritual worth borrowing: while you wait between meteors, the satellites keep moving, and a bright pass of the space station over a dark site is a fine intermission.

The single biggest cause of failed meteor nights is cloud, and cloud is the one factor you can check in advance. WorldEye's weather layer and the public webcams near dark-sky country let you look at the actual sky conditions over your intended spot — a mountain pullout under cloud is worse than a back garden under clear sky. Our guide to watching the northern lights on live webcams covers the same scouting technique: pick cameras in genuinely dark places, check them after nightfall, and only then decide whether the drive is worth it.

Be honest with yourself about what the cameras are for. A webcam will almost never catch an Orionid for you — the meteors are fast, the sky is big, and a fixed camera stares at one small patch of it. The cameras tell you whether the sky is clear and dark, which is the decision that matters. The show itself is resolutely analogue: you, a blanket, and the upper atmosphere.

You will want a photograph, so set the terms before you go out: meteor photography is a numbers game played against a black sky. Prop the phone on a tripod or a beanbag — hand-held shots of the night sky are just blur — and use its night or long-exposure mode aimed at a wide, dark stretch of sky well away from the radiant, where trails run longest. Then take many exposures, not one. Most frames will hold nothing but stars, and that is normal; professionals discard hundreds of frames for every keeper.

What a phone realistically captures is the occasional bright fireball, and even that demands luck with timing and aim. Settle for a different trophy and you'll enjoy the night more: a long exposure of the watch party itself, Orion rising over the horizon, star trails from a time-lapse. The meteors are for your eyes. The camera is for everything around them.

The Orionids trail off through late October and the first week of November, so a clear night on October 23 or 24 still delivers a respectable showing, especially in that same post-moonset window. And the sky calendar keeps moving: the same Halley dust stream produces the Eta Aquariids in May, and the much stronger Geminids arrive in December. Learning the Orionids' habits — radiant, moonlight, patience — is training for all of them.

When you do catch a bright one, note the time. Comparing notes with other watchers, and with the satellite and flight traffic crossing the same sky on the [live map](/), is part of the fun: a surprising amount of what people report as strange lights turns out to be a satellite train or a high airliner catching the sun. The real meteors are faster, shorter, and better.