What’s that light zipping across the night sky? Is it a satellite? Is it a plane? All of these are possibilities, but if you’re looking out at the night sky this Saturday and Sunday, there’s a good chance you’ll spot some “shooting stars” from the annual Perseid meteor shower.

The show, which reliably begins in mid-July and concludes at the end of August, will peak Saturday night. Skywatchers, under clear dark skies, can expect to see anywhere from dozens up to 100 meteors an hour, zipping by at 37 miles per second.

Shooting stars and meteors are the same thing. A meteor is any piece of space rock, interstellar pebble or other chunk of debris that burns up in a planetary atmosphere. It’s a meteoroid when it’s still up in the air passing through space, and a meteorite if a small fragment of it survives and hits the ground.

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“This is one of the three most active in meteor showers — meaning producing the most visible meteors,” said NASA ambassador Tony Rice. The other two most prolific meteor showers are the Geminids and the Quadrantids, which peak in December and January — when viewers have to bundle up to watch.

Viewers globally will be able to see the show, but the Northern Hemisphere will have the best seats. The Perseids can be best seen a couple of hours before sunrise, according to Rice. But viewers that don’t want to wake up at 3 a.m. can also see meteors as early as 10 p.m., according to NASA.

Known as the best meteor show, according to NASA, the Perseids show up in August when a debris field left by Comet Swift-Tuttle in 1992 barreled past Earth. Tiny particulates, the size of a grain of puffed rice, heat up as they are met by friction from Earth’s atmosphere. That lights them ablaze.

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The small bits of stony material also compress a small cushion of air ahead of them as they barrel through the atmosphere. That heats and ionizes the air, causing it to glow. It’s what makes the shimmering glow-in-the-dark trails that linger for a second or two after a meteor soars overhead.

Random shooting stars happen a couple times every night, and can make for magical moments if you happen to get lucky. But meteor showers, on the other hand, can be planned for and looked forward to because of their prolific nature and reliability.

Meteor showers occur when Earth encounters a particularly dense pocket of debris, usually left in the wake of a since-departed comet or asteroid. Much like driving through a swarm of bugs and ending up with a smear on your windshield, the Earth plows into this spattering of small rocks, each of which sparks up in our outer atmosphere. We see the meteors at the same time every year, since we encounter the debris pocket at the same place in our annual orbit about the sun.

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Perseids are known for sometimes creating spectacular fireballs, meteors brighter than Venus, which produce explosive streaks of light that are longer, brighter and more persistent, according to the American Meteor Society.

“You might see some meteors that last a couple of seconds. There will be fewer of them, but they're going to be more spectacular,” Rice said.

The Perseids are named for the constellation Perseus — the constellation the meteors appear to come from — but Perseus isn’t the source of the meteors. It simply serves as a directional cue. Look to the northeastern part of the sky late at night: If you can’t find Perseus, you may also see meteors by looking at dark patches in the sky.

Recommendations from Rice:

Most Perseid meteors are faint, but fortunately moonlight won’t wash them out like it does in some years. This weekend, the moon will be but a thin crescent, 10 percent illuminated and won’t rise until the pre-dawn hours. It’s heading toward being a new moon, which will occur on Aug. 16.

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Of course, the ability to see the meteor shower is weather-permitting. Fortunately, the atmosphere is looking unusually cooperative across a wide swath of the Lower 48 states. Here is a forecast of where clouds could limit viewing opportunities:

Saturday night

There are a couple of areas of concern for clouds. One is the result of a large, diffuse pocket of high altitude low pressure and unsettled conditions draped from the northern Intermountain West, Alberta and Saskatchewan all the way east to the Great Lakes and eventually the Northeast. It will cause a few showers and storms in New England, parts of the northern Mid-Atlantic and perhaps the northern Rockies. That could leave some high, thin cloud debris across much of the northern United States, but there will be a number of breaks in the cloud cover. Pinpointing where exactly, however, is difficult. Otherwise, a few thunderstorm complexes might fire up by evening over the southern and central Plains, yet, once again, it is difficult to pinpoint where they might form.

Sunday night

An exceptionally promising forecast is in the cards for much of the western United States, with only a few clouds scattered about the Four Corners region. Depending on where daytime thunderstorm complexes go as they head east of the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, Upper Midwest, Ohio Valley, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast could see some scattered patches of cloud cover, but more locations than not will be at least partially to mostly clear.

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