Don’t let anyone say you missed the Perseid Meteor Shower. Though the shower peaks Thursday night, this is a shower to be watched over a span of many nights. While it is true last night produced more meteors than usual, meteors from this shower continue entering our atmosphere for many days ahead.

A meteor is a piece of falling space debris, smaller than a penny, that enters our atmosphere at a high rate of speed and burns up before getting anywhere near the ground. While meteors are hitting the earth all the time, only the ones approaching our atmosphere at night can be seen.

The Perseid Meteor Shower is lots of meteors coming into our atmosphere from the same place in the sky. They are an August annual treat. Meteors from this shower appear to come from the constellation Perseus and thus they are named after the constellation Perseus. The Perseid Meteor Shower has no physical link to the constellation, but are the remnants and pieces of a comet called Comet Swift-Tuttle. Every year at this time the Earth enters the orbit of this comet and the shooting stars start falling.

If you are looking for a good time, get a cup of hot cocoa and step outside late in the evening, the later the better. Meteors can appear at any time at night, but later is best. They appear at random from the area of the sky in the northeast. You may see a meteor coming from an entirely different direction too. The Delta Aquarid meteor shower peaked on July 28.