The Perseid meteor shower is one of the best cosmic light shows of the year. Here’s why you need to see it this week.

By Miriam Kramer From Mashable

Each August, the Earth passes through a stream of dust and ice producing one of the most consistent and beautiful meteor showers of the year.

This year, the Perseid meteor shower will peak in the overnight hours from Thursday into Friday, bringing as many as 200 shooting stars per hour to the darkest skies on the planet. This is about double the number of meteors that can be seen during a typical Perseid meteor shower.

This cosmic light show is the result of a fortuitous cosmic alignment between debris sloughed off by Comet Swift-Tuttle and Earth’s orbit around the sun. As the comet makes its way round the star, completing an orbit once every 133 Earth-years, it leaves behind ice and dust that enters the planet’s atmosphere and can be seen from the ground as sudden streaks of light.

The shower can bring hundreds of meteors to dark skies, and it’s in these dark places that photographers have gotten their best views of the meteor shower.

Humans have been watching the Perseids fly overhead for centuries, and 2016’s Perseids will be from bits of debris left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle decades ago.

“Here’s something to think about. The meteors you’ll see this year are from comet flybys that occurred hundreds if not thousands of years ago,” NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke said in a NASA statement.

“And they’ve traveled billions of miles before their kamikaze run into Earth’s atmosphere.”

When the meteors slam into Earth’s atmosphere, they will be speeding at about 132,000 miles per hour, and burning bright at about 3,000 to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, NASA said.

Meteor showers like the Perseids are best seen from dark skies free from light pollution, but parts of the world that fit that description are becoming harder to find.

The best way to watch a meteor shower – even from somewhat light-polluted skies – is to lie back in a comfortable patch of grass and try to see the widest view of the sky possible.

While you may not see hundreds of meteors from within a city or even in the suburbs, you’ll still probably have a front-row seat to a view of the brightest shooting stars – known as fireballs – as long as you have the patience to wait for them to appear.

For more on this story go to: http://mashable.com/2016/08/10/perseid-meteor-shower-photos/?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed#4VnHHVIMwSqG