The Perseid meteor shower, a spectacle that will dazzle the northern hemisphere

The peak of the meteor shower will occur on Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, and coincides with a total solar eclipse over Spain, Iceland and Greenland and a parade of six planets, although the best time to see the fireballs will come after totality.

Up to 50 to 100 meteors per hour could be seen in ideal conditions, according to NASA. The American Meteor Society estimates that between 30 and 50 meteors per hour could be observed from rural areas.

Isolated meteors can be seen in dark skies on any given night. Meteor showers often provide dazzling celestial spectacles and occur at predictable times each year, as Earth passes through trails of debris left by comets and sometimes asteroids. These debris collide with the Earth’s atmosphere at extremely high speeds, producing trails of light known as shooting stars.

Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson explained to The Associated Press on Sunday that “comets typically have orbits that cross the Earth’s orbit. So when they get close to the sun and the sun evaporates the ice, it releases a lot of the dirt and gunk that’s frozen inside the comet, and it continues to orbit the sun.”

The Perseids are debris from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, an icy ball that orbits the sun every 133 years and will return in 2125.. Observations of this meteor shower date back more than 2,000 years.

The Perseids are an annual favorite because they tend to produce brilliant fireballs. Summer temperatures also make this rain popular.

“We don’t have to endure a cold winter night to get a good view of meteors,” said astronomer Zach Vanderbosch of the McDonald Observatory in Texas.

The Moon will be in a new phase during the peak of the Perseids, making viewing conditions even better.

“The moon is beautiful, but it’s a diva,” said astronomer Aparna Venkatesan of the University of San Francisco. “A new moon means we don’t have moonlight flooding the sky, and as a result you tend to see a lot more meteors.”

To view meteors, go outside after dark, away from clouds and city lights. Venkatesan plans to drive to the Sierra Nevada.

The best views will be between midnight and dawn, when the constellation Perseus is high in the northern sky. The meteors will appear to radiate from that constellation.

Look up and give your eyes half an hour to adjust to the darkness. Vanderbosch recommends choosing a patch of sky to focus on until a fast, bright trail passes by—even in your peripheral vision—and avoiding looking at your phone.

“There is something just magical about it,” he said.