Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks This Weekend perseid meteor shower peaks tonight

Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks This Weekend — Just Look Up

Each summer, the Perseid meteor shower brings a flow of shooting stars to the night sky.

And this year, it has done us all the favor of arriving right after a new moon — allowing the meteors to show off without lunar competition.

The meteor shower will peak late Sunday night & early Monday morning, but you can also catch a good number of meteors in the middle of the nighttime on Saturday.

So if you happen to be out late this Saturday, take a second to look up.

Darker locations are better — away from city lights if probable — but otherwise, any location will do. You can look anyplace in the sky; there's no need to focus on a particular location. Let your eyes vary, and wait.

You can also watch the Perseids online, but barring bad conditions, we vacillate to recommend that route. C'mon. Life is short. Grab a picnic blanket.

The Perseid shower is famed for bright, fast meteors that leave a long wake behind them, NASA says. You can spot 50 to 100 of them each hour.

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"Perseids are also identified for their fireballs," NASA writes. "Fireballs are larger explosions of light & color that can persist longer than an average meteor streak. This is due to the fact that fireballs originate from better particles of cometary material. Fireballs are also brighter."

If you pay consideration to the trajectories of the shooting stars in the sky, they look like they're all coming from a point right by the constellation Perseus, NASA says — hence the name Perseids.

"On the other hand, the constellation for which a meteor shower is named only serves to aid viewers in influential which shower they are viewing on a given night," NASA notes. "The gathering is not the source of the meteors."

Instead, the meteors are remnants of the tail left by the less romantically named comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.

As Earth passes through that streak of space debris, the bits of rubble go round into flaming streaks crosswise our sky.