Watch tonight’s Perseid meteor shower live right here

On any given night you can see about 4 meteors per hour as “space junk” falls through Earth’s atmosphere.

The Perseid Meteor shower is an array of ice and dust particles from the Perseus constellation travelling at 133,000mph past our planet. Experts recommend giving yourself at least one hour of viewing time and you may want to add some more time after you see some Perseids.

“Look towards the familiar constellations Cassiopeia and Perseus in the northeast”.

Where is your favorite place to stargaze in Des Moines? You will not need any special equipment like a telescope or binoculars.

Most of the meteors are only the size of a grain of sand, but the force of their impact on Earth’s atmosphere heats up the air around them enough to make streaks of light shoot across the sky.

The Perseid meteor shower is the result of debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle, which last visited our solar system in 1992 in its 133-year journey around the Sunday.

Thanks to a lack of moonlight, this year’s meteor shower will be one of the brightest in recent years. This year’s meteor shower is expected to be phenomenal because it will be more visible than usual.

The Perseids, which are considered the best meteor shower of the year, can bring 50 to 100 meteors an hour.

Avoid light pollution: Any dark, moonless sky away from major manmade light will offer an equal chance of seeing the meteors, which will blaze across various parts of the sky.

What to do? The shower peaks tomorrow night, but viewing can be quite good on either side of the peak date. It also coincides with a new moon, meaning that the sky will be clear for the meteors to show up without any glare from the moon overshadowing them.

Welch said conditions might be better in Erie and Niagara counties, where the forecast calls for the sky cover to be 20% or less between 2 and 5 a.m. Thursday.