Last weekend the Orionid meteor shower peaked. To be honest, it's a rather weak shower, with a max of maybe 25 meteors per hour. I mentioned it on Twitter and other social media, but it's usually a so-so shower at best so it didn't seem worth it to plug it much. Even big showers like the Perseids, Leonids, and Geminids can be fairly variable in what you see, so I usually only plug the bigger ones. Still, the Orionids can be nice if you have dark skies. Mike Lewinski went out to Embudo, NM (along the Rio Grande river) to do some meteor photography and happened to catch a spectacular fireball from the shower. It even left what's called a persistent train, a trail of ionized, vaporized material that can glow for quite some time. I combined three of his images into one composite to show you the sequence:
On ...
