How to see October's full Hunter's Moon (and the Orionids) tonight

Bats fly under a full moon in Belarus.

(Image credit: Aleh Nekipelau via Getty Images)

The full moon this week will spill pale light onto October's spookily-carved Halloween pumpkins and autumn-hued leaves this Wednesday morning (Oct. 20).

The moon will be full at exactly 10:57 a.m. EDT (2:57 p.m. GMT) on Wednesday, when the sun, Earth and moon line up (in that order), according to NASA. Because the moon's orbit is about 5 degrees different than Earth's, it is often a bit higher or lower than Earth's shadow, which allows the sun to bathe the side of the moon facing Earth with light when there's a full moon, Andrea Jones, a science communicator at NASA, previously told Live Science in a video interview.

According to the now-defunct Maine Farmer's Almanac, which, in the 1930s, reported on Native American moon names, common names for the October moon included the Travel Moon, the Dying Grass Moon and the Sanguine or Blood Moon, among the Algonquin tribes of North America, NASA reported. Some of these names likely refer to leaves changing color in autumn and the dying back of plants, whereas the Sanguine and Blood Moon reference hunting.

The Travel Moon may refer to the migration of birds and other animals getting ready for winter. "I don't know, but this name may also refer to the season when the more northern tribes would move down from the mountains for the winter," Gordon Johnston, a NASA program executive, wrote in a post. "For example, both the Iroquois and Algonquin would hunt in the Adirondacks in the summertime but would leave to avoid the harsh mountain winter."

Scientists recently coined a new moniker for this full moon — the Lucy Moon, in honor of NASA's Lucy mission that launched on Oct. 16 and is journeying to the Trojan asteroids. These asteroids go around the sun with Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Lucy will spend 12 years exploring seven of these asteroids, as well as one asteroid from the main asteroid belt that Lucy will encounter on its way, NASA reported.

As for the Orionid meteor shower, skywatchers in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres may see as many as 20 meteors per hour, Space.com reported. That's way more than the average of five meteors per hour that skygazers can see on other nights, Live Science previously reported. Meteors, colloquially known as shooting stars, are bits of space rocks that burn up in bright streaks across Earth's atmosphere. The best views for the meteor shower will be far away from city lights, but the light of the full moon will likely make it hard to see these streaking beauties.

The Orionid meteors come from the shed pieces of Comet 1P/Halley, more famously known as Halley's Comet, which swings by Earth every 75 years or so. The meteor shower appears to come from the constellation of Orion, the hunter, which is how the shower got its name. The best time to see the meteor shower is around 2 a.m. local time Oct. 20, but if you miss the peak, you can still catch the meteor shower until it dwindles in late October, Cooke told Space.com.

Laura is the managing editor at Live Science. She also runs the archaeology section and the Life's Little Mysteries series. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in science writing from NYU.