During the summer months of July and August, our planet passes through a pile of space rocks that are no bigger than a grain of sand. The shower is called the Perseid meteor shower.
There is a peak in the dark hours of August 11th and 12th. The show will be affected by the fact that there is a bright full moon.
On a non-full moon year, NASA says you can see up to 60 meteors per hour.
You should be able to see some shooting stars in the nights leading up to the peak.
One of the most popular and consistent shower of the year is the Perseid. Our planet passes through the tail of debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle in the summer.
As Earth swoops through the comet's icy, rocky leftovers, small bits of debris plunge through our atmosphere, heating up to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and streaking through the sky at more than 100,000 mph.
Most of these tiny meteors burn to a crisp in the atmosphere, though a rare few crash land on the planet's surface.
Earth passes through the densest part of comet Swift-Tuttle's debris cloud in the middle of the night.
During the peak of the shower, stargazers can see as many as 60 meteors per hour.
The number will be much lower this year as the full moon will obscure some of the falling rocks.
Live Science's sister site Space.com suggests going to the dark place in the pre-dawn hours of 12 August or one of the nights leading up to the peak to see the peak.
It takes up to 30 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the darkness and you should be able to see the constellation Perseus by the end of the day.
The shower is named after the constellation from which the meteors appear to originate. The meteorites are in the sky.
Humans have been watching this event for a long time. The discovery of a comet named Swift-Tuttle was made in 1862 by Lewis Swift and a fellow astronomer.
The astronomer realized that the comet produced the shower.
NASA says that comet Swift-Tuttle is the biggest object known to fly past Earth. The nucleus of the comet is approximately 26 miles wide.
The extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by an asteroid that only measured about 12 km across.
Swift-Tuttle passes the sun every 133 years. Astronomers have calculated the comet's trajectory thousands of years into the future and found that it doesn't pose a threat to Earth.
According to Space.com, Swift-Tuttle will pass within a million miles of our planet in 30 44. It's close, but it's still twice the average distance between Earth and the Moon, meaning there's little risk for life on the planet.
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The original article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.
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