Meteor showers light up the sky in the coming nights

Those who want to see the shooting stars should look to the northeast, preferably from a dark location. Fewer meteors can be seen in cities because of light pollution. Moonlight hardly disturbs the spectacle.

On Saturday night, about 30 shooting stars per hour can be expected around midnight. This number increases in the course of the night. Around 4 a.m., an average of about 50 to 60 meteors per hour should be shooting across the sky. Many meteors will also be seen during the night from Sunday to Monday.

The Perseids are called so because the shooting stars seem to come from the constellation Perseus. In reality, they are dust particles and chunks of the comet Swift-Tuttle. When the Earth passes through the comet's debris cloud in its orbit around the Sun, these particles burn up in the atmosphere at an altitude of 100 kilometers. We see this as meteors. The Perseids are known to hurtle through the sky at speeds of more than 200,000 kilometers per hour.

The meteor shower used to be called the Tears of Laurentius, because the shooting stars appear around the name day of Sint-Laurens.