Orionid peak: tonight, 21–22 October 2026

Every Orionid is a crumb of Halley's Comet.

Tonight Earth ploughs through the dust Halley left behind on earlier visits, at about 66 km/s. Watch a whole night of sky squeezed into 2½ minutes, tap only the real Orionids, and find out which ancient pass of the comet each grain fell off.

Night Watch · 11 p.m. → dawn

Tap the Orionids. Only the Orionids.

✓ Orionid — fast, straight, and its path points back toward Orion's raised club.

✗ Sporadic — a random meteor whose path doesn't lead back to Orion.

✗ Taurid — slow, often golden, drifting out of Taurus.

✗ Plane / satellite — blinking lights, or a steady slow dot.

Keyboard: Space tags the newest meteor · P pauses

Sky drawn for 40°N looking east to south. A real night gives 10–20 Orionids an hour; this one is sped up.

66 km/sOrionid entry speed — about 41 miles a second

10–20meteors per hour expected at the 2026 peak

2–3 a.m.the bright Moon sets; darkest sky until dawn

1 in 30Orionids is a fireball, by one estimate

2061Halley's Comet comes back to the inner solar system

More ways to play

The whole sky, tonight

🎯 Radiant Hunt

Ten levels, thirteen showers. Read a handful of meteor trails and tap the spot they all fly out of.

☄️ Halley Time Machine

Drive the comet around its 75-year orbit, and walk 33 passes from 1266 BC to the Bayeux Tapestry and Giotto.

🔭 Will I See Any?

Pick your city, sky and clock time to estimate how many Orionids you'll really see per hour.

🧠 Meteor IQ

Ten random questions from a bank of 34. Meteor, meteoroid or meteorite? Prove it.

How to spot a real Orionid

All the Orionid grains travel through space side by side, on parallel paths. Perspective makes parallel lines look like they spread out from one point, the way railway tracks seem to meet at the horizon. That point is the radiant, and for the Orionids it sits just north of Betelgeuse, by the Hunter's raised club.

So the test is simple: trace a streak backwards. If it leads to Orion's club, and it was quick, it's an Orionid. A slow, lazy streak from the direction of Taurus is a Taurid, dust from Comet Encke. Anything else is a "sporadic", one of the stray meteors that fall every night of the year.

Grain dates in the game are illustrative: real Orionid dust was shed over thousands of years, and scientists traced the surprise 2006 outburst to grains released around 1266, 1198 and 911 BC.