October meteors
BEST TIME TO SEE: From 20:30 BST (19:30 UT) on 8 October
There’s good news and bad news for meteor watching in October. The bad news concerns the annual Orionid shower, which reaches its peak on 21 October. With a peak ZHR of 20 meteors per hour, the Orionids is a popular event to observe. During 2021 however, the peak occurs with a just-past-full Moon in the sky and many of the shower’s trails will be lost to its glare.
The good news concerns a lower-rate shower named the Draconids (also known unofficially as the Giacobinids, in reference to the parent comet 21P/ Giacobini-Zinner). This shower has a very low ZHR peak value of five meteors per hour, but has shown increased activity over the past few years. The shower put on spectacular displays in 1933 and 1946, with ZHR rates measured at thousands of
meteors per hour. Enhanced rates were also seen in 1998, 2005, 2011 and 2012. The 2012 event consisted mostly of very faint trails, which were detected by the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar facility.
More recently, in 2018 the shower put on an impressive display equating to a ZHR of 150 meteors per hour over a four-hour period. Although there are no predictions for enhanced activity in 2021, the whole point of meteor observing is to record what actually happens regardless of
predictions. It’s only with recorded data that future predictions can be refined.
Why is this good news? Well, that pesky Moon, which will wipe out a lot of the Orionid shower, is new on Wednesday 6 October and will not interfere with the 2021 Draconids. Draconid meteors are best seen in the evening on 8 October. The shower trails are especially slow, the meteoroids entering Earth’s atmosphere at 21km/s – less than one-third the speed of November’s Leonid meteorids.