Meteor Shower!

    Starting at 10p.m this evening there will be an Orionid meteor shower. It is going to be a good show this year, so better go out and check it out! The moon will be slimmed down to a narrow crescent before sunrise on Tuesday, October 21, 2014 morning during the peak of the shower. The skinny lunar line will not even rise until around 5 a.m.

    If you can't see the meteor shower from outside your home, then you could watch it live online. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama will show a live webcast tonight on October 20, 2014 starting at 10 p.m. They will show live meteor showers, if you don't see it outside your home. You can watch the live meteor shower on Space.com.

   The meteors are known as "Orionids" because they seem to move from a region to the North of the group of stars, Orion's second brightest star, Betelgeuse. As of right now, the Orion is ahead of Earth with the planet's journey around the sun, and it does not appear to rise completely above the Eastern horizon up until after 11p.m tonight, the local time.

    The Orionid meteor shower happens every year because the famous Halley Comet leaves dust behind when the Earth passes through the cycle. Every year, this comet creates two meteor showers on Earth. Comets are the leftovers from when the solar system first formed, the bits and pieces of simple gases- methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. This went unused when the sun and its attended planets came into their present form.

    The absolute best time to watch this amazing meteor shower is around 1 or 2a.m when it begins again. That is the best time because you could see everything better and the stars will be high in the sky and that means that there will be more meteors all over the sky. The Orionids are known meteor showers that are observed and seen in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The meteors are not well seen in cities or towns but you can see them better in rural communities like the countryside. The Orionids are one of the better annual displays, producing more about 15 to 20 meteors per hour at their peak.

  The meteor shower will be active for many days after. It will last from the October 20, 2014 and to the 24th. Look outside right before sunrise and you might catch a sight of a meteor in the sky. The meteor shower will begin to slow down after the morning of October 21, 2014. It will only show five meteors per hour around the date of October 26, 2014. Then, the last meteors will show in early to mid November.