One of the most brilliant meteor showers of the year can be viewed tonight.
The Geminid meteor shower (named for the Gemini constellation) is set to start late at night on Friday Dec. 13 and will continue into the wee hours of Saturday morning, Space.com reported.
The shower is expected to produce 90 to 120 meteors an hour, which makes the odds of getting a glimpse fairly high. The number of meteors is expected to peak at about 4 a.m. local time.
"This year, there will be a magic hour starting at about 4 a.m. up until dawn that there will be no moon and you'll be able to see the Geminids in their full glory," Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office said, Space.com reported.
The meteors in this particular shower tend to be "bright and slow," Space.com reported.
"The best thing to do to observe meteors is to lie flat on your back and look straight up," Cooke said. "You don't want to look at Gemini, you just want to look straight up and take in as much of the sky as possible because meteors can appear anywhere in the sky and the more sky you see, the better you chance of seeing a meteor."
The Geminid meteor shower occurs annually, when Earth's orbit takes it through a trail of debris left behind by the 3200 Phaethon asteroid.
The rate of meteors per hour has been steadily rising since the phenomenon was first documented in the 1800s.
"Those rates have increased over the almost two centuries since then by up to over 120 an hour," Cooke said. "This is because Jupiter's gravity is tugging that string of debris that comprises the Geminids closer to Earth as time goes along. Geminid rates over the next decade or century could exceed over 200 per hour."
A livestream of the event will begin at 5:30 p.m. EST.
NASA will be hosting a live chat on the subject starting at 11:00 p.m. EST.
