The 2012 Perseids Meteor Shower online at NASA

A Perseids composite as  seen on Aug. 12-13, 2011. Concentric circles are star trails.

The annual Perseid meteor shower peaks this weekend and if you can't catch the "shooting star" spectacle in person, you can tune in online for live views of the meteor display from NASA.

NASA is inviting people to participate in its "Up All Night" live chat with astronomer Bill Cooke and his team from the Meteoroid Environment Office at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., on Saturday night from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. EDT.

Cooke and his colleagues will answer peoples' questions, while participants enjoy live video and audio feeds of the Perseid meteor shower from a camera mounted at the Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA officials said.

Experts predict this year's Perseid meteor shower will be an impressive sky show, with a waning crescent moon expected to interfere only slightly with the night sky display.

During the meteor shower's peak this weekend (late Saturday night and into early Sunday morning), many fireballs may also visible in the night sky, NASA officials said.

"We expect to see meteor rates as high as a hundred per hour," Cooke said in a statement.  "The Perseids always put on a good show."

The Perseids are actually bits of rock and debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle, which was discovered in 1862.

The comet orbits around the sun once every 133 years, but every August, Earth passes through a cloud of its debris, and as the bits of ice and dust burn up in Earth's atmosphere, they create the spectacular Perseid meteor shower that we are familiar with now.

The Perseids are so-called because they appear to radiate from the direction of the constellation of Perseus.

The meteor shower can be seen all over the sky, but the best places to view Perseids will be across the northern hemisphere, according to NASA.