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Every year in autumn, our planet passes through a ribbon of space-debris left behind by Halley’s Comet, and Earth’s atmosphere colliding with this trail of ice and dust provides an impressive annual light show called the Orionids meteor shower. The first Orionid shooting stars are already showing up in the sky, and the show will continue through the first week in November or so, but the peak of the meteor shower will happen in the early morning between October 21 and 22. Residents of the Northern Hemisphere who look at the southwestern part of the sky at around 3-4 a.m. can expect to see between 20 or 30 meteors per hour streaking across the sky until sunrise. It will appear that the meteors are originating somewhere between the Orion constellation (hence the name) and the Gemini constellation, but they should be visible in other parts of the sky too, as long as it’s not too cloudy. These bits of ice and burning space dust slam into our atmosphere at 41 miles per second, and when they burn up, they can produc
