The Orionid meteor shower peaked on the nights of Oct. 21-23, delighting lucky stargazers with a gorgeous natural fireworks display as debris from Halley’s Comet collided with Earth’s atmosphere to create fiery shooting stars in the night sky.
Photographer Osama Fathi was among these lucky skywatchers, and captured a spectacular view of Orionid meteors streaking through the sky over Lake Qarun in Egypt on Oct. 19, as the shower ramped up activity ahead of its 3-day peak.
“This composite image combines a few meteor frames captured over three hours from Qatrani, near the northern edge of the lake,” Fathi told Space.com in an email. “Out of more than 200 photos taken during the session, only a handful of bright meteors aligned gracefully near the constellation Orion — visible at the center right of the frame.”
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Fathi’s composite skyscape was created by combining a three-minute exposure of the night sky with multiple 10-second shots of meteors captured using a Nikon Z6 camera fitted with a 14-24 mm Nikkor lens.
Orionid meteors captured blazing through the sky over Fayoum in Egypt. (Image credit: Osama Fathi)
The peak of the 2025 Orionid meteor shower coincided with October’s new moon phase, which presented stargazers with a magnificently dark night sky in which even the faintest shooting stars could be spotted flaring to life against the starfield beyond.
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(Image credit: Jase Parnell-Brookes)
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If clouds conspired to ruin your view during the Oct. 21-23 peak, there’s no need to worry, as there’ll be plenty more shooting stars to see in the coming days, according to Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society. “Rates will fall very slowly after these dates so the mornings of October 24-26 will still provide hourly rates in excess of 10 per hour when viewing from rural dark skies,” Lunsford told Space.com in an email. “Note by then the radiant will have moved eastward into western Gemini so folks should not be surprised to see these meteors shooting from that constellation instead of Orion”.
Photographers interested in capturing their own shooting stars should check out our guide to imaging meteor showers, along with our roundups of the top cameras and lenses for astrophotography.
Editor’s Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com’s readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.