This weekend is the peak of Perseid's meteor shower, one of the best-known and largest celestial events that can be seen from Earth.
Throughout the past couple of days, meteors have been visible to on-lookers and will get an even better view during the event's peak on Friday night.
"Meteors are these tiny little pieces of space dust that crash into the earth and burn up, and when that happens we see them in the sky as a falling star or a shooting star," says Scott Young, the Planetarium Astronomer at the Manitoba Museum. "The meteor is sort of the official name for those objects, and on any night you can probably see one or two of those if you're lucky, but on certain nights of the year, the Earth goes through a big cloud of cosmic dust and when you get all that dust hitting the Earth all on the same night, you get lots of meteors. So we call that a meteor shower."
Young also says that it won't look as if thousands of stars are falling out of the sky, but rather it will be one star every minute instead of one a night.
"It always occurs every year around August 11-13, somewhere in that range because we're going through the dust bunny left behind by a comet that crosses Earth's orbit. Now, that doesn't always mean that you will see all of those things hitting the Earth, and the timing might happen during the day for you. It might be cloudy, or like this year, close to the full moon. When the full moon is up, it makes it hard to see some of those fainter meteors that you would see."
The best time to see any meteor shower is between midnight and dawn. According to Young, even with the bright light of the full moon on the same night as the peak time to see meteors, it is a strong enough shower that viewers will still be able to see shooting stars.
"The official peak occurs after midnight, Friday night, so Saturday morning around 3:00 a.m. our time. But to be honest, it's not a single-night event. It builds up over a previous couple of weeks and each night there'll be more and more meteor showers until the peak and then after the peak, it fades away for a couple of weeks."
The comet that causes the meteor shower is comet Swift–Tuttle, discovered by Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle in 1862.
"Each meteor shower over the course of the year has its own source objects, most of them are comets and we know that when we get close to the comet's orbit in our orbit, we'll see this meteor shower. They're actually named after the constellations in the sky where the meteors look like they're coming from. When we're looking at the sky, it seems that the meteors from the Perseid meteor shower will come from the constellation Perseus, which is rising in the northeastern part of the sky at this time of year. That doesn't mean you have to know where Perseus is, the meteors can appear all over the sky."
To get the best view of the meteor shower peak, Young suggests viewers go to a place where there are not a lot of lights and even "put your back towards any bright lights that are like the moon or city lights." He also suggests putting the phone away, because the bright light will cause your eyes to need time to adjust to the dark sky and some of the dimmer shooting stars may be missed.
"This is one of those things where you have to unplug, disconnect and just lay out under the stars, relax and look up. it's a great therapeutic way to connect with the sky."
Normally on the peak day of the event, Young will go out with an all-sky camera and broadcast live on the Manitoba Museum's Facebook and YouTube pages, but he says it always depends on the weather.
Young says that popular spots to view celestial events include Birds Hill Park and Oak Hammock Marsh, but because of the accessibility of the meteor shower, on-lookers can go anyway.