Tonight’s Geminid meteor shower may be the best meteor shower of the year. Scientists predict the shower will peak between 2 a.m. and dawn, so it’s probably past your bed time, but it may well be worth it. “The Geminids have been slowly getting better over the past years, making it one of the best showers,” Gyuk said. “And it has become very reliable, so we can expect a fairly nice show.”

Most yearly meteor showers happen when the Earth passes through a comet’s debris cloud. The Geminids are different, though. This shower is believed to come from a three-mile-wide (4.8 kilometers) asteroid-like space rock called Phaethon.

Read more about the meteor shower on National Geographic News.

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Photograph by Wally Pacholka, TWAN