The year’s most reliable meteor shower, the Perseids, is reaching its peak today as the Earth ploughs through a river of comet dust. 

A bright Perseid meteor caught by the writer over the sea from Walmer, Kent, early on 12 August. Credit: Paul Sutherland/Galaxy Picture Library

The shower is showing healthy levels of activity, as usual, and observers have taken advantage of the northern hemisphere’s warmer nights to catch these natural fireworks.

If you haven’t observed them before, you can check out my article for the space website Sen.com to find a guide on how best to watch for them. This year is a particularly good one for Perseids as the Moon is just a pale crescent and so will not drown out the fainter ones.

Remember that, though you might see newspaper articles quoting rates of as many as 100 an hour, these are numbers that usually assume things like the point from which the meteors radiate being directly overhead, and an absence of any light pollution. In practice, you will be lucky to see one every two or three minutes.

But if you find a dark spot and a garden chair to relax in, you may be rewarded by some fine meteors. The Perseids have high levels of bright meteors and fireballs.

Do be patient. You may have to wait several minutes for your first meteor, then find that a couple more come along at once, like buses. Such is the nature of randomness.

The meteors you see are only the size and consistency of granules of instant coffee, so they do not survive as they flare 80km or more up in the atmosphere.

I spent an hour watching for Perseids over the North Sea this morning from Walmer, Kent, in the UK. I managed to catch a few with my Canon EOS 600D camera, fitted with an ancient and battered Pentax-thread 24mm lens. You can see a couple of moderately bright meteors that I caught on this page.

Another Perseid meteor photographed by the writer from Walmer, Kent, UK. Credit: Paul Sutherland/Galaxy Picture Library