Today we are going to be taking a look at some of the meteor showers that are occurring during the month of October and we’re going to start with the Draconids because the Draconids are the first good shower that we’re going to get. They are technically peaking on the 9th of October, but we may be better off observing them tonight, the 8th.
We’ll move ahead to the 9th, and the range be given by Stellarium for the peak is 20-700 meteors an hour. The Draconid meteor shower occasionally has outbursts and there were Draconid meteor storms back in the 20th century that reached thousands of meteors an hour. Those storms, the Draconid outbursts, are rare. They certainly don’t happen every year and one was predicted for 2025. I don’t know if the Draconids had a proper outburst in 2025, but seeing hundreds of meteors and hour is unlikely. However, there is still a good chance that we will get above the lowest numbers. We’re getting a local hourly rate of 6, seen from the city with the light of the Sun in the sky, for sunset on the 8th. This is with the Draconids fairly high in the sky. There is a very good chance that we will get higher than just 6, at least up to 10 or 15. At that time, the current zenith hourly rate is lower than the maximum zenith hourly rate.
We’ll say that these meteors can get up to 20 an hour, their absolute peak, even if the real amount could be higher. By moving backwards through a little bit of time the local hourly rate climbs up to 16, 17, 18 and eventually 19. It gets up to 20 just after midnight on the 8th. For those of us here in Ireland, we would be better off starting to observe on the 8th. As the Sun sets on the 8th, we get a current zenith hourly rate of 18, and that goes up to 20 over the course of the night. When it really peaks, when it’s up to 20, that is after midnight, so that is why the peak is being described as the 9th of October. For the actual night of the 9th of October, the rate has dropped down to about 15 by the time the sky is dark, with about 6 meteors an hour visible from the city. However, when the actual amount of meteors coming from this radiant is at its highest, up to about 20 at just about 2:30 in the morning, the local hourly rate is down to 3. This is partly again because of light pollution but also because the Draconids are now so low in the sky. We want to have them as high in the sky as we possibly can and we can see that they get as high as 7 from the city as the Sun is setting, allowing for the limiting magnitude caused by the light pollution that we have in the city.
The Draconids are potentially a very good shower but they are unlikely to produce a meteor storm or an outburst this year. It’s radiant is in the constellation of Draco, hence the name Draconids, but an old name for the Draconids are Giacobinids. The Giacobinids after Giacobini, as 21P/Giaccobini-Zinner is the comet that is the parent body of this shower. This comet has a very short period, it’s only about six and a bit years for it to go all the way around the Sun. It’s going to come back in towards us by 2031, so it won’t take long for that comet to come back around but we won’t look too much at that comet just yet.
We do have some other meteor showers to consider but they’re all going to be occurring much later in the month and they’re going to be rising later in the night. Also, most of them are not going to be quite as good. The October Camelopardalids already peaked on the 6th of October, but they only get up to a maximum of five meteors and hour, and even then, if we come forward to the 6th, it doesn’t look like we’re actually going to get that many. Even when it should be five we’re probably only going to see one in the city, it’s not a particularly impressive shower. The Southern Taurids, aren’t peaking until the 5th of November, but they run over a very long period, so even though we’re probably not getting many from them, they are still technically there. We probably are getting one or two every now and again but not the kinds of rates that we would need for it to be particularly impressive.
The Orionids are the other good shower in October, but they’re not as prominent as the Draconids and they don’t tend to have those big outbursts. As we move forward, we can see a few other meteor showers joining in and disappearing. The October Delta Aurigids up in Auriga are peaking on the 11th, when we get about 2 an hour. That’s about the best that it will do, even though it’s not far off the zenith when it peaks. That is one of the best views we could get, and it still doesn’t produce much. It is very early in the morning, we’re looking at about 4:30. We’ll keep moving forward in the month to get the Eta Geminids into the sky. They’re peaking on the 18th, so not too far away from the Orionids, and they’re also in a reasonably similar part of the sky. The Eta Geminids will run through the Orionids, all the way to the 27th of October, but their actual maximum peak is still pretty low, around 5. We’ll keep moving forward, the Leonis Minorids in Leo Minor peak on the 24th, with a maximum of two. All of those meteor showers are significantly smaller. The Andromedids, which aren’t peaking until November, also begin in late October.
We’ll come back to the 21st. When the Orionids are producing 17 out of their 20 maximum, they’re up in the morning. They hit their actual maximum while the Sun is still up for, for us. Moving past their peak to the next sunrise, and they’re still up at 19. Again, this is a meteor shower where we might get a better view of them not on the date of their peak. It’s still up to 18 as they get higher in the sky before the Sun rises and our local rate is 6. That is with the light pollution of the city, so we will head out of the city into the countryside and that should give us a local hourly rate that isn’t being blocked out by light pollution. That brings us up to 15, 15 meteors an hour visible for us here in Ireland, while it’s supposed to be producing 18, out of the 20 that it could produce at its peak. The Northern Taurids are after popping up there, they’re also not peaking until into November. The antihelion point is producing four meteors an hour. That is part of the background rate, those are little bits of rock that are falling into our atmosphere all the time. They are not from a trail of material left behind by a comet, which in the case of the Orionids is Halley’s Comet, probably the most famous comet. Halley’s Comet is 1P/Halley, P for periodical and ! for the first. Compared to Giacobini-Zinner which is 21P, the 21st periodical comet discovered. 21P is going to be coming back in relatively soon, Halley’s Comet isn’t coming back in for quite another while. I do have another piece on this website looking at Halley’s Comet, where we go forward to its return, but this time I am going with Comet Giacobini-Zinner.
Stellarium is already aware of 21P/Giaccobini-Zinner, but with data from 2025, so it is a little outdated but it’s not too bad. It should be coming past Jupiter in 2029, so another few years away. It’s going to be pretty close to its furthest distance now, given that it comes back around every six years. Right now it is five and a half AU from us, almost five, AU from the Sun and we can tell from the direction it’s in that it’s pretty much behind the Sun. If we move out to 2031, that will bring its distance down. Then it’s only a fraction of an AU away from us now, which is still 17 million kilometers, in October. We’ll move through time but it looks like this is a Southern Hemisphere comet by late 2031. However, that’s not the perfect time to see it, we’ll need to move back into August to get its closest to the Sun. It doesn’t get too close to the Sun. This comet moves from outside of Jupiter’s orbit into around our distance from the Sun. Back to its perihelion, which isn’t when it is closest to us, that brings it above the horizon for us in the Northern Hemisphere. It seems pretty good, at 4th magnitude it should be visible to the naked eye. It doesn’t come up in Stellarium, but I shouldn’t be surprised because it is based off of 2025 data rather than the 2031 data that would be necessary to accurately predict its position. That is little comet that’s coming back around in the near future and it is the parent body of the Draconids which we are going to see in the next couple of days.
Although it is unlikely, I don’t believe the Draconids are having an outburst this year, I also don’t think it’s impossible. We may be surprised. Although we do know a lot about space, we do occasionally get surprised and we are occasionally wrong, like the Blaze Star still not having blazed. The Draconid meteor shower will certainly provide some meteors for us and if you miss them early in the month, we still have the Orionids later in the month and I do hope you get to see both of them. I hope that you enjoyed this piece talking about those upcoming meteor showers. If you did then please do like it. If you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel Thank you very much for watching and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.
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