How to Photograph the Orionid Meteor Shower With an iPhone (21–22 October 2026): Timing, Moon, Settings and Realistic Odds

The Orionids are the autumn meteor shower, debris from Halley's Comet that the Earth runs into every October. The 2026 peak is predicted for 21 October, with the best viewing in the dark hours before dawn on the mornings of 21 and 22 October. It is not the strongest shower of the year, and this year's bright Moon makes it harder still, but it is reliable, it is visible from both hemispheres, and its meteors are fast and often leave glowing trains. Photographing one with a phone is possible and is mostly a question of planning. This guide covers the timing, the Moon problem, what to point the phone at, the settings that give you a chance, and what a night-sky camera app like Night Cam can realistically do for you.

The 2026 facts you need

• Active period: late September to late November; the shower is active now and the rate climbs towards the peak.
• Peak: 21 October 2026, with the two best mornings being 21 and 22 October. The radiant, the point the meteors appear to come from, rises before midnight and is highest around 2 a.m. local time.
• Expected rate: roughly 10 to 20 meteors per hour under a dark sky at the peak, fewer with light pollution or moonlight. In rare years the Orionids have reached 50 to 75 an hour; nobody is predicting that for 2026.
• Speed: about 66 kilometres per second, among the fastest of any shower, which is why Orionids are brief streaks rather than slow fireballs.
• The Moon: a bright waxing gibbous, around 80 percent lit, with full Moon on 26 October. The Moon sets in the early hours, several hours before dawn on the peak mornings, which is the single most important fact in this article.

Plan around the Moon, not the peak hour

A gibbous Moon washes out faint meteors and, more to the point for a phone, floods a long exposure with grey. The good news is that on 21 and 22 October the Moon sets before the best viewing hours. Check the moonset time for your location, then plan to be in position and settled from moonset until the sky starts to brighten; for most of Europe and North America that is roughly 3 a.m. to the start of dawn. Night Cam's Tonight tab shows the moon phase and the next twelve hours of cloud cover for where you are, which answers the two questions that matter the night before: will the Moon be gone, and will the sky be clear.

Give your eyes twenty minutes to adapt and keep them adapted. A phone screen at normal brightness undoes that in seconds. Night Cam's red night mode turns the whole interface red, which protects your night vision while you adjust settings and check frames; if you are using the built-in Camera app instead, drop the screen brightness as low as it goes before you leave the house.

Where to point the phone

Do not aim at Orion. The meteors radiate from near the club of Orion but appear all over the sky, and the ones closest to the radiant are short; the longest, most photogenic streaks are 40 to 60 degrees away from it. Aim the phone at a dark patch of sky a good distance from Orion, ideally with something on the horizon for scale, and accept that this is a numbers game. Then use the widest lens you have. The main 1x lens gathers the most light on most iPhones and is the usual recommendation for stars; the ultra-wide covers more sky and therefore catches more meteors, at the cost of a noisier, softer frame. For meteors specifically, the ultra-wide is a defensible choice. Try both.

The honest part: how a phone catches a meteor

A dedicated camera for meteors runs continuous 15- to 30-second exposures for hours and keeps the one or two frames that caught something. A phone cannot run an unattended hour of raw long exposures in the Camera app, so you need a different strategy, and no app, including Night Cam, has a magic meteor preset. What you have are three approaches that each give you a real chance:

• Repeated stacked stills. Night Cam's Stars preset takes a 16-second stacked exposure after a 3-second countdown, which is enough time for a bright Orionid to cross the frame. Fire it again as soon as each capture finishes, for as long as you can stand the cold. Each capture is a lottery ticket; thirty tickets an hour is a fair number.
• A star-trails session. The Trails preset accumulates light over a long session into one image. Stars draw arcs; a meteor that crosses during the session draws a straight streak that cuts across those arcs, which is a distinctive and rather beautiful result. This is the closest thing a phone has to the dedicated-camera method, and the one most likely to catch something if you can leave the phone running.
• Time-lapse. The Time-lapse preset records the sky moving. A meteor appears in one or two frames of the result, which you can freeze and export. You get a lower-quality still than the other two methods, but you also get a clip, and a clip with a meteor in it is worth more on social platforms than a still.

Whichever you use, the phone must not move at all. A tripod with a phone clamp, or the phone wedged against a wall or a fence post, is not optional. The 3-second countdown before Night Cam captures exists so that your tap does not shake the frame; the same logic applies to the built-in Camera, where a volume-button press or a Bluetooth remote is steadier than tapping the screen.

Doing it with the built-in Camera app

If you would rather not install anything, the built-in Camera app's Night mode on a tripod gives you exposures of up to around 30 seconds on recent models when the phone detects it is stable. Turn the flash off, tap the darkest part of the sky and drag the exposure slider down slightly so the sky does not turn grey, and shoot repeatedly. Its weaknesses for meteors are that you cannot run it unattended and that each shot needs a tap. For the Moon, incidentally, do the opposite of everything here: it is bright, needs a short exposure, and comes out better with the Moon preset in Night Cam or a tap on the Moon itself in the Camera app to expose for it.

Settings checklist for the night

• Battery full, and a power bank if you plan a trails or time-lapse session; long captures in the cold drain quickly.
• Flash off. Screen as dim as possible, or red night mode.
• Tripod or solid prop. Phone locked in position; do not touch it during a capture.
• Aim 40 to 60 degrees from Orion, with the widest lens you have.
• Focus set to infinity; Night Cam's presets lock it there, in the Camera app tap a bright star and hold to lock.
• Start after moonset, keep going until the sky brightens, and resist checking every frame.

What Night Cam is, and what it costs

Night Cam: Stars & Aurora is an iPhone-only app, for iOS 18 or later, built around two things: a free forecast and a night camera. The Tonight forecast shows the aurora chance for your location from NOAA's Kp forecast and OVATION model, the next twelve hours of cloud cover and the moon phase, and it is always free. The camera has presets for the Moon, Stars, Aurora, star Trails and City for photos, and Night video, Aurora Live and Time-lapse for video. The download is free and includes three captures; after that Pro is a one-time $4.99 purchase, or a $0.99 Night Pass unlocks everything for 48 hours, which is a sensible option for a single meteor-shower weekend. There is no subscription and no account.

If you have read the earlier guide to iPhone camera settings for the northern lights, the stillness and focus advice is the same; the difference with meteors is that you are photographing something that may or may not happen in any given 16 seconds, so the strategy shifts from one careful shot to many repeated ones. The aurora forecast explainer covers the other thing worth checking on an October night, since a geomagnetic storm would make the same dark sky doubly worth being out in.

Set your expectations, then go anyway

Be realistic. With a 10-to-20-per-hour shower, a phone, and a Moon that only sets a few hours before dawn, a good night might yield one or two frames with a meteor in them, and a cloudy night yields none. The people who get the photo are the ones who went out on both mornings, set up before moonset, and let the phone run. The ones who do not get the photo still spent a couple of quiet hours under a dark sky watching the fastest meteors of the year, which is not a bad consolation.