Catch a Falling Star and Put it in Your Pocket

London, 1866. Photo courtesy of Agnes Giberne/Newscom

The last time I watched a meteor shower, I was wrapped in a blanket on Roe Park field in Highland Falls in the middle of October. It was freezing, but it was pretty awesome. So, if you have something you’be been meaning to wish upon a star about, tonight would be the night.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Perseid meteor shower has been raining down for the past two nights, and is set for an American performance early Friday morning. This shower is created from the debris of the Perseid comet, which flies around the sun once every 135 years, last passing in 1992, according to the CSM.

The debris “is a very old stream that has been building for a long time and is a very dense concentration of dust,” meteor researcher Peter Jenniskens told CSM. “If you look back at records from the Middle Ages, you can see that people in the Middle Ages were seeing the Perseid meteor shower.”

So grab some wine and a blanket and venture out around midnight tonight. For more details, vist the American Meteor Society .