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(NEW YORK) — Another dazzling display of the wonders of outer space will be visible from Earth in the coming days.

The annual Orionid meteor shower, which originates from Halley’s Comet, is expected light up the night sky starting this weekend.

Considered by NASA as “one of the most beautiful showers of the year,” the Orionids are the latest astronomical event this month, which already has included a strong solar storm that led to widespread northern lights, the Tsuchinshan-Atlas comet, and the brightest supermoon of the year.

“There’s been a lot of great celestial events this year alone,” Shawn Dahl, coordinator for NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, told ABC News, describing them as “a lot of glorious things to see in the sky.”

The Orionid meteor shower is produced every year when Earth passes through the debris – composed of ice and dust – left behind by Halley’s Comet, according to NASA.

When the debris trail intersects Earth’s atmosphere, the debris disintegrates and creates streaks in the sky, according to NASA.

The intensity of the peak activity tends to vary, but they are “much higher than usual” this year, Elizabeth Macdonald, a space physicist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told ABC News.

In a normal year, the Orionids produce 10 to 20 showers per hour, but during exceptional years, such as 2006 to 2009, the peak rates were on par with the Perseids, at about 50 to 75 per hour, according to the American Meteorological Society (AMS).

The Orionids can be seen from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres without a telescope, according to NASA. In the Northern Hemisphere, face southeast, and if in the Southern hemisphere, face northeast.

However, the light from the supermoon, which began to wane on Friday, is expected to limit a lot of visibility, Macdonald said.

“The moon is going to bleach out a lot of meteors,” she said.

But even with the full moon, “relatively bright” meteors from Orionid tend to streak across the sky, said Dahl, who does backyard astronomy as a hobby.

Traveling to the darkest spot possible will likely increase the chances of seeing the shower, Macdonald said. It is also important for stargazers to keep their eyes dark-adapted in order to see the meteors, which includes avoiding constant interaction with the bright screen of a cell phone, Dahl said.

“In less than 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adapt and you will begin to see meteors,” NASA advised. “Be patient – the show will last until dawn, so you have plenty of time to catch a glimpse.”

Awareness of the direction to look toward is important as well, Dahl said. The meteors tend to be “pointing back” as they’re streaking through the sky, so looking toward the radiant in the sky – that is, the point where the paths of meteors appear to meet – will increase the chances of seeing them, Dahl said.

“You have to be kind of know the general area of the sky to look,” Dahl said. “That’s why [meteors] have a name.”

The radiant of meteors is the constellation from which they appear to originate, according to NASA. For the Orionids, the radiant is the constellation Orion.

But it is not necessary to only look toward the radiant, as the Orionids are visible across the night sky, according to NASA, which advised viewing the Orionids from 45 to 90 degrees away from the radiant.

The Orionids tend to peak during mid-October every year, according to NASA, with the hours after midnight typically the best viewing times.

The meteor shower is expected to peak on Sunday and Monday, at which point the moon will be 83% full, according to the AMS.

The best time to see the meteor shower will probably be Monday night, once the supermoon has waned, Macdonald said.

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(KENTUCKY) — A former Kentucky sheriff accused in the fatal shooting of a judge in September was arraigned on new charges Monday.

Monday’s arraignment hearing was held in the Letcher County Courthouse — the same courthouse where Shawn “Mickey” Stines is accused of gunning down Kentucky District Judge Kevin Mullins in his chambers on Sept. 19.

An attorney for Stines, 43, pleaded not guilty on his behalf Monday to a new charge of murder of a public official.

The judge denied Stines bond, citing concerns with security, community safety and the charges against him.

Stines previously pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder charges, for which a special judge appointed to preside over the case has said he could face the death penalty.

It is still not clear what led up to the alleged murder of Mullins, 54.

Just days before the shooting, Stines had been deposed in a lawsuit, which alleged he had failed to investigate one of his deputies who sexually abused a woman in Mullins’ chambers.

Kentucky State Police previously said the shooting occurred “following an argument inside the courthouse.” Letcher County Circuit Clerk Mike Watts said Stines and Mullins had lunch together earlier that day.

Mullins was found in his chambers with multiple gunshot wounds after a 911 caller reported gunfire inside the courthouse.

Stines was taken into custody without incident at the courthouse, police said. He retired from his position as sheriff shortly after his arrest.

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(WASHINGTON) — A “zombie star” could possibly rise from the dead on Halloween night, according to space experts.

T Coronae Borealis, also known as the “Blaze Star,” is expected to explode violently in the near future, illuminating a long-dead binary star system for the first time in 80 years, according to NASA.

The Blaze Star has become a white dwarf, which happens when stars have exhausted their nuclear fuels.

“It’s basically a dead star,” NASA astrophysicist Padi Boyd told ABC News. “It’s not burning anything.”

The dead star has a comparable mass to Earth’s sun, according to NASA. By contrast, Earth’s sun is constantly burning elements such as hydrogen and helium, Boyd said.

The Blaze Star is part of a binary system; it has a companion star — a red giant star — that it “gobbles” material from, Boyd said. Material such as hydrogen is transferred by a strong gravitational pull, according to NASA.

“Like a vampire,” the white dwarf sucks material from its companion star, Boyd said. The material sits on the surface of the white dwarf until there is enough material to ignite a thermonuclear runaway explosion — a buildup of pressure and heat. This allows the “dead” star to become “very, very bright,” she added.

Every eight decades, when the Blaze Star system bursts into a bright light, it becomes visible to the naked eye, Boyd said.

“It’ll become as bright as some of the stars we see on the constellations at night,” she said.

The first recorded sighting of the Blaze Star was in the autumn of 1217, when a German priest and chronicler named Burchard of Ursperg observed “a faint star that for a time shone with great light,” according to NASA.

It was last seen from Earth in 1946, according to the space research agency.

It is difficult to predict when a nova — a process in which a star shows a sudden large increase in brightness — will occur, Boyd said.

“This explosion, it could happen tonight; it could happen a year from now or six months or a couple of weeks,” Boyd said. “We know it’s coming soon.”

The Northern Crown is a horseshoe-shaped curve of stars west of the Hercules constellation, according to NASA. In the Northern Hemisphere, it can be identified by finding the two brightest stars — Arcturus and Vega — and tracking a straight line from one to the other, leading stargazers to Hercules and the Corona Borealis.

The outburst is expected to be brief. The nova, when a star shows a sudden large increase in brightness, will only be visible to the naked eye for less than a week, according to NASA.

To astronomy enthusiasts, it will appear as if a new star appeared in the sky, Boyd said.

“It’ll look like the jewel in the crown of the corona,” she said.

Scientists are hoping to study the nova to discover what happens when the material is blasted from the white dwarf and distributed into neighboring galaxies, Boyd said.

The material includes elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and neon. Other stars will gather this material as they are forming their own solar systems, Boyd added.

“This is where that material in our own solar system — in our planet, in the oceans, in our bones, in our blood — those materials come from stellar explosions,” Boyd said.

The excitement surrounding the event is expected to “fuel the next generation of scientists,” Rebekah Hounsell, an assistant research scientist specializing in nova events at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement earlier this year.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that will create a lot of new astronomers out there, giving young people a cosmic event they can observe for themselves, ask their own questions, and collect their own data,” Hounsell said.

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