The Leonid Meteor Shower is one of the year's favorites. And while we are more than a week from the radiant date of November 17 and 18th, keep your eyes out at night for early arrivals.

Shooting stars are fun to watch and in the nights ahead there is a pretty good chance you'll see a Leonid meteor, or maybe even one from the earlier seasonal Taurid meteor shower. Under ideal conditions and at the peak of the shower you may see up to 15 meteors in an hour of watching. Now? Stragglers or early arrivals can't be predicted. Just know that a meteor shower happens when the Earth passes through a field of debris left by a passing comet. 

In the earliest days of astronomy, people thought the shooting stars came from the constellation. Thus this annual shower is named after the constellation Leo which rises in the eastern sky around midnight. We now know that the meteors, or space debris come from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. The comet has an elliptical  orbit, and comes close to the Sun every 33 years. It was first discovered in 1865.

The debris coming into our atmosphere and burning up is really small. It hits the Earth's atmosphere at great speed and completely burns up, but at night when this happens, we are treated safely with the sight of a star shooting across over our heads.