The annual Orionid meteor shower occurs when debris from Comet Halley intercepts the Earth at a high velocity. This debris stream is somewhat diffuse, so we see activity for several days on either side of the peak.

This is a composite image of 230 meteors collected on the evenings of October 18-22. An additional 8 meteors are not shown because they were against a bright, pre-dawn sky. Because the images were collected over many hours, the radiant of the shower is not clearly seen. A handful of meteors in this image are sporadics, meaning they aren't part of the Orionid shower. The meteor frequency was:

• Oct 18/19 - 18
• Oct 19/20 - 75
• Oct 20/21 - 29 (shower peak, bad weather)
• Oct 21/22 - 3 (bad weather)
• Oct 22/23 - 113

Long necklace-like streaks are stars or planets captured as they traveled across the sky over many hours. These form arcs centered on Polaris, which is located fairly low in the sky above the zero degree azimuth marker.