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ORIONID METEOR SHOWER: This weekend, a mild but pretty flurry of meteors will shoot out of the constellation Orion. The source is Halley's Comet. Although the comet itself is far away, ancient clouds of dust from the comet are nearby, and Earth is about to run through them. The best time to look is Saturday morning, Oct. 21st, just before local dawn: sky map. AURORA WATCH: A solar wind stream is heading for Earth and it could cause a geomagnetic storm when it arrives on Oct 20th. Sky watchers especially in Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada should be alert for auroras. 
Above: Auroras over Nuuk, Greenland, on Oct. 15th. "We've had a lot of auroras here lately," says photographer Rune Christiansen. "I went out to take some pictures of star trails, but the geomagnetic storm put a stop to that." STAR TRAILS: Warning. Staring at this picture may make you dizzy: 
These are star trails--slow, graceful arcs traced by the stars as Earth spins on its axis. "It was a clear night last night, so I decided to let my camera do an 'all-nighter,'" explains pohotographer Larry Landolfi of Rochester, New Hampshire. "I made this 8-hour exposure of my house looking towards the North Star." The North Star, a.k.a. Polaris, is the stubby arc near the pattern's vertex. Because Earth's north pole points almost directly at Polaris, the star barely moves throughout the night, making it useful for direction-finding. But Polaris won't always be the North Star. Earth's spin axis is slowly precessing, and in 10,000 years or so Vega (six times brighter than Polaris) will take over as North Star. Star trail photos will look even prettier then, with an intense bright dot in the center of the starry whirlpool. BONUS: Among the star trails, Landolfi also caught an Iridium flare. Can you find it?
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.
On 20 Oct 2006 there were 803 known Potentially
Hazardous Asteroids
The Orionid meteor shower will peak before dawn Oct. 20-24, producing about 20 meteors per hour. To view them, find a dark spot with an open view of the sky. Watch in whatever direction the sky is darkest since artificial light will diminish visibility of these faint meteors.
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