The annual Perseid Meteor Shower peaks this month during the morning hours of the 12th. All regular meteor showers appear to radiate outward in different directions from the same spot in space known as the radiant. The constellation Perseus rises late in the evening and viewing the meteors is really at the best in the early morning hours when your place on the Earth is rotating around toward the Sun and thus moving you more directly inro the meteor shower. Sort of like driving into wind-blown snow.
   As with most meteor showers the meteoroids that enter our atmosphere as meteors, or shooting stars, come from the debris left along the orbital path of a particular comet. The Perseids, which owes its name to the constellation it appears to radiate outward from, has its roots in the Comet Swift-Tuttle, a comet with an orbital period of about 120 years. As comets, which are often described as 'snowy dirt balls', orbit the sun their dirty icy surface is heated by the sun and the solid ices sublimate directly into a gas. This also releases the non-ice materials, what we refer to as the dirt in a comet, along the orbital path the comet follows. If the Earth's orbital path crosses the comet's orbital path at the location of the comet debris then some of the debris enters our atmosphere and glows brightly from frictional heat high in the upper atmosphere.
   Some leave a glowing trail, lasting for several seconds, called a train.