At this time of year, Orion rises at about 11 p.m. local time worldwide, so the best time to view the Orionids will be after midnight, Hammergren said.

According to Cochran, the 2009 Orionids shower will benefit from a moonless midnight sky.

A big, bright moon can make it hard to naughty castles spot streaking meteors. But the moon will be new during this year’s Orionids peak, she said, meaning it’ll be dim and will dip below the horizon not long after sunset.

For the best views, Hammergren and Cochran both recommend going to a dark site away from city lights and allowing enough time freshwater pearl earrings for your eyes to adjust to seeing fainter objects in the sky.

“You don’t need binoculars,” Cochran added. “Just lie back in a reclining chair or on a blanket and enjoy the show.”

But dress warmly, Hammergren pearl strand wholesale advised: “You always cool off more than you think you will just lying there—that’s a lesson novice astronomers learn real fast!”

But it wasn’t until the 1800s that astronomers noticed that some large groupings of “shooting stars” also appeared at regular leisure chairs intervals. Still later, those groupings were linked to comets.

The mass of a comet is basically a fifty-fifty combination of dirt and ice left over from when the planets were forming about 4.5 billion years ago, the McDonald Observatory’s Cochran explained.

When a comet comes into the inner wholesale pearl jewelry solar system—which includes Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt—the sun’s heat turns some of the comet’s ice into gas. Without the ice to hold them to the comet, some rocky fragments fall away.

“That stuff doesn’t just disappear,” Cochran said. “When Earth’s orbit intersects with those dust streams, the particles hit the upper wholesale pearl jewelry atmosphere, creating meteors.

A fragment shed by a comet is usually no larger than a grain of sand. But sometimes those grains travel together in groupings, or clumps, which can be held together by gravity for hundreds of years, Adler’s Hammergren added.

Since these clumps form when the biwa pearl comet is near the sun, Earth is most likely to hit them in years when the comet is once again close to the planet—resulting in a more spectacular meteor shower.

For example, next month astronomers pearl jewelry wholesale expect Earth to pass through a clump of material left behind by comet Tempel-Tuttle, which might boost the annual Leonid meteor shower to produce as many as 500 meteors an hour.

But Halley’s comet is now almost at its pearl jewelry wholesale farthest point away from the sun, Hammergren said, so “I wouldn’t expect a clump [for the Orionids] this year.”

Still, he said, for fans of the famous space rock, the Orionids in any year are “a great chance to see a piece of Halley’s comet in the sky.”