Orionid meteor shower 2026: how to see Halley's Comet dust

A visitor that keeps its appointments

There is a comet that will not be back in my lifetime, and almost certainly not in yours, and this week you can stand in the garden and watch pieces of it burn.

Halley's Comet came closest to the Sun in 1986. The next time it does so will be 2061. In between it is a long way out in the dark, keeping an appointment it has kept for as long as anyone has kept records. People have been writing it down, under one name or another, for well over two thousand years. It is the one comet most people can name, and the only famous one that returns on a human schedule, which is to say once if you are lucky, twice if you are both lucky and patient.

But the comet itself is nowhere near us. What is near us, every October, is the mess it leaves behind.

The Orionids are the crumbs

Each time Halley swings through the inner Solar System it sheds a trail of dust and grit. The Earth, going about its own orbit, ploughs through that trail twice a year, and in the second half of October we meet it as the shower called the Orionids. The specks are mostly smaller than a grain of rice. They strike the top of the air at a tremendous speed and burn up high overhead, and that brief scratch of light is what we have always called a shooting star.

So when you catch one this month, you are not watching the comet. You are watching its crumbs, laid down on visits that happened before you were born, catching fire one at a time.

You are watching its crumbs, laid down on visits that happened before you were born, catching fire one at a time.

I find that steadies me rather than the reverse.

How to actually see one

This year the shower peaks in the hours before dawn on 21 and 22 October, and a few stragglers fly most nights for a week or so either side. The Moon is bright that week but sets in the early hours, so the darkest window runs from moonset until first light.

You need no telescope, which is the first mercy. A telescope would only narrow your view, and a shooting star can appear anywhere. You want the opposite of equipment: a dark patch of sky, a chair that lets you lean back, and time.

The hours after midnight and before dawn are best, when your side of the Earth has turned to face the direction we are travelling. Get away from the worst of the streetlights if you can. Give your eyes a full twenty minutes to adjust and do not ruin them by checking a bright phone. Then stop looking for anything in particular. Let the whole sky sit in front of you and wait. The ones worth seeing arrive at the edge of your attention, and reward the person who was patient enough to be bored first.

If the sky gets hold of you after this, my book Backyard Astronomy Without a Telescope covers meteor showers, the planets, the constellations and the rest of what the night shows for free, one short session at a time.

The long view

What I like about the Orionids is that they ask almost nothing and give back a sense of scale you cannot buy. The comet that made them will come round again in 2061. Someone reading this will be here to see it, and will perhaps remember, on a cold night that year, that they once watched its dust on an ordinary October evening and thought the whole thing far away.

It was never far away. It was overhead the entire time, in pieces, falling quietly, keeping its word.