It’s mid-November, so the Leonids are here! The popular meteor shower is expected to offer us a special night show that will peak late Saturday.

According to the scientists from NASA’s Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign, this year the Leonid meteor shower won’t be as spectacular as in the past years, but it will still be able to offer the sky watchers an interesting light show for the next couple of nights. However, people can get the best view of the so-called shooting stars during the meteor shower’s outburst, which will start on Saturday at about 11 p.m. EST and will last only one or two hours.

"There will be pretty much normal shower activity, 20 per hour at most,” said the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Bill Cooke. In the past years and especially between 1999 and 2002, the sky watchers witnessed more powerful Leonid meteor storms, as they were able to see even more than a thousand meteors per hour.

The Leonids are associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle and got their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo.

Because of their remarkable strength, the Leonids had a major effect on the development of scientific study of meteors. They became also very popular among the sky watchers, who can now visit http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/estimator.html for more updated information.