Stargazers are in for an amazing celestial display tonight, as the Perseid meteor shower will light up the night sky in what has been predicted to be a spectacular event. According to NASA, we should be able to see meteors every couple of minutes during the dark hours before Tuesday, August 12.

The Perseid meteor shower occurs when the Earth passes through a meteor stream, and in this case, the origin of the meteors is the comet Swift-Tuttle. In the comet’s passage by the Sun, it ejects particles that form the Perseid cloud – the tail of the comet.

The comet was discovered almost 150 years ago. It takes 133 years for it to complete the orbit around the Sun. In 1992, the comet created the most spectacular meteor shower in recent history, with four times the average number of meteors.

The Perseid meteor shower is known to regularly occur ever year in mid-summer, while reaching a peak in the first half of August, when the chances are to see tens of meteors in a matter of minutes. The meteors are known as Perseids because they appear to come from the constellation Perseus.

Despite its highly known regularity, the Perseids failed to appear for the first time in 2000. According to the International Meteor Organization, the Perseids were much more dynamic in the 1990s, with rates decreasing after 2000.

This year, “the time to look is during the dark hours before dawn on Tuesday, August 12th,” as Bill Cooke from NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center explained. “There should be plenty of meteors--perhaps one or two every minute.”

The comet Swift-Tuttle is currently positioned at an impressive distance, beyond the orbit of Uranus, but the trail it leaves behind stretches all the way back to Earth. The specks of comet dust will hit Earth’s atmosphere at 132,000 mph. At this speed, even a flimsy speck of dust creates a vivid streak of light as it disintegrates upon entering the atmosphere, NASA explained. These incandescent particles are known as meteors.

“Earthgrazers are long, slow and colorful,” explained Cook, also adding that “they are the most beautiful of meteors.” And even though the sky will not necessarily be shattered by Perseids at all times, seeing just a few of them will make the wait worthwhile.

Cook explained that in the night between August 11 and August 12, the light of the gibbous Moon will interfere with the meteor shower for a short period of time. However, after 2 a.m. Tuesday morning, the Perseids will become visible once more. Hundreds of meteors are expected to light up the sky by dawn.

The Perseid meteor shower may be the most visible meteor shower we witness, but it’s not necessarily the most spectacular. Once ever 33 years, the Leonids meteor shower, also known as the King of Meteor Showers, produces the so-called meteor storms, with hundreds of thousands of meteors per hour.

In addition to the visually-observable showers, there are still many other weakly active ones throughout the year, usually observed by still-imaging, video, radar or telescopic observations can identify, the International Meteor Organization informs.