A shooting star is a 3,000-year-old crumb
The Orionid meteor shower peaks on the night of Wednesday 21 to Thursday 22 October 2026. Most guides tell you when to look. We wanted to show you what you're looking at: dust from Halley's Comet, shed on visits the Babylonians, the Normans and Giotto watched, now burning up 100 km over your head at 66 km/s.
What's here
- Night Watch — a whole night, 11 p.m. to dawn, in 150 seconds. Tap only the Orionids. Each one you catch is tagged with a pass of Halley it might have come from.
- Radiant Hunt — ten star-map puzzles across thirteen real meteor showers.
- Halley Time Machine — an orbit simulator and a 33-pass timeline that also holds your grain album.
- Will I See Any? — a meteors-per-hour estimate for your own latitude, sky and clock time.
- Meteor IQ — 34 questions, 10 per round.
How the game models the sky
Stars are placed from their real coordinates and turned with sidereal time for the night of 21–22 October 2026, for an observer at 40° north looking from east to south. The Orionid radiant (RA 6h20m, Dec +16°) rises around 9:30 p.m. local solar time and climbs past 60° by dawn. The Moon sets around 2:30 a.m., after which the sky darkens and fainter meteors appear.
Meteors are launched along great circles leading away from their radiant. Their apparent speed follows their real entry speed (66 km/s for Orionids, about 27 km/s for Taurids, 70 km/s for Epsilon Geminids) and how far they are from the radiant. Their brightness follows a population index of 2.5. Rates are sped up for the game: a real observer under dark skies should expect 10–20 Orionids an hour.
The calculator uses the standard observer formula: hourly rate = ZHR × sin(radiant altitude) ÷ r(6.5 − limiting magnitude), with ZHR 20 and r = 2.5, corrected for clouds, moonlight and twilight. It's an estimate, not a forecast: real rates can be higher or lower.
A note on the grain dates
The dates on your grains are illustrative. Nobody can tell which pass a single meteor came from. What is known is that the Orionid stream was built up over thousands of years, and that the strong 2006 outburst was traced to dust released around 1266, 1198 and 911 BC that had been held in a 1:6 resonance with Jupiter. We give those three passes a small chance of turning up and tag every other grain with a historically recorded pass from 240 BC to 1835.
Sources
- EarthSky — Orionid meteor shower 2026 guide: peak on 21 Oct at 18 UTC, 10–20 per hour, 66 km/s, active 26 Sept–22 Nov, radiant by Orion's raised arm, Halley facts. earthsky.org
- Space.com — How to see the Orionid meteor shower 2026 peak: waxing gibbous Moon setting after about 2 a.m., 15–20 per hour before dawn. space.com
- Farmers' Almanac — Orionid meteor shower 2026: moonset around 3 a.m., about 1 in 30 Orionids a fireball, 240 BC / 164 BC / 87 BC records. farmersalmanac.com
- Sekhar & Asher, "Resonant behavior of comet Halley and the Orionid stream" — the 2006 outburst and ejection dates around 1266, 1198 and 911 BC. arXiv:1303.2928
- Wikipedia — Halley's Comet: orbit, nucleus size, apparition history, 1910 and 1986 passes, the 2061 return. en.wikipedia.org
- WinCalendar — 21 October 2026: Moon about 78% lit, waxing gibbous in Aquarius moving into Pisces. wincalendar.com
- Meteor-shower values (peak dates, ZHR, speeds, radiants, parents) follow the International Meteor Organization's working list, rounded. imo.net
Credits
Concept, code, writing and artwork are original to this site. Fonts: Bricolage Grotesque, Inter and IBM Plex Mono via Google Fonts. No trackers, no accounts. Your scores, grain album and settings stay in your browser's local storage.
Built for dailyma.de, where a new site appears every day. This one lives permanently at dailyma.de/archive/2026-10-21/.