Who doesn't enjoy a brilliant flash traversing the nighttime sky? I'm not talking about lightning, rather, the annual celestial show called the Perseid meteor shower.
It peaks this weekend with the absolute best time to capture as many as possible will be Sunday night, early Monday morning. It's quite possible, after you allow your eyes to adjust, you could view as many as 60 to 70 per hour or as many as one per minute. They also tend to be brighter than average.
It's usually not advantageous to run into a debris field but in this circumstance, it certainly is.
Each year around mid-August earth orbits through the debris field left behind by the comet Swift-Tuttle. The debris, or tiny meteors, enter the atmosphere approximately 50 to 75 miles above the earth at an amazing speed of 20 to 45 miles per second (up to 25,000 to 160,000 mph).