Earth pays its annual visit to the Leonid meteor shower Thursday night and Friday morning; this view is at 1 a.m. looking east.
CREDIT: Starry Night Software
As the Earth moves around the sun in its annual orbit, it passes through patches of space debris left behind by comets and asteroids.
As it moves through these clouds of dust and sand-sized particles, it sweeps them up, and they are heated to incandescence by friction with the Earth's atmosphere, causing bright streaks of light in the night sky known to scientists as meteors, and to skygazers as shooting stars.
Meteors can be seen every night; these are known as sporadic meteors but when the Earth passes through a cloud of debris, it sometimes produces displays known as meteor showers.
A famous annual shower known as the Leonids is set to peak Thursday night (Nov. 17).
Unlike rain showers, meteor showers are not concentrated. Usually they mean seeing 10 or 20 meteors an hour, as opposed to the typical average of one or two.
Most of the time the Leonids are a fairly quiet shower, but every 33 years they put on a major display, known as a meteor storm.
This last happened in 1999, when more than a thousand meteors per hour were observed.
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