A meteor shower is expected to peak sometime after midnight early Saturday morning and will be visible through the Northern Hemisphere starting mid- to late evening tonight.
The Geminid meteor shower happens once a year when Earth's path intersects with the asteroid Phaethon, a CBS local outlet reported via EarthSky.org.
Debris from the asteroid crashes into our planet's atmosphere "to vaporize as colorful Geminid meteors," according to EarthSky.org.
While the moonlight is expected to be bright tonight, those wishing to view the meteor shower can expect to see as many as 50 meteors per hour. The best place to view the meteors is somewhere away from city lights, according to the CBS report.
For the West Coast, the meteor shower will be best seen "between 3:45 a.m., when the waxing gibbous moon will set, and 5:45, when sunrise lightens the sky," the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
According to Patrick Wiggins of NASA/JPL, concentrating too hard on one part of the sky won't help in spotting meteors, since focusing on one spot will result in missing other places.
EarthSky.org advises "at least an hour of observing time" since it takes approximately 20 minutes for eyes to adjust to the dark and meteor showers often have lulls.
The Geminids are "cosmic visitors from a long-dead comet," Wiggins said.
Many the size of a grain of sand, the meteors compress the air in Earth's atmosphere upon entering it and ignite, burning and streaming across the sky.
"The Geminid meteor shower is one of the finest meteors showers visible in either the Northern or the Southern Hemisphere," the Tribune said.
The newspaper said the Geminid's plentiful shower even rivals the August Perseids, a shower that occurs each summer when the Earth passes through debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle, according to Space.com.
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