Geminid meteor shower lights up the night skies with up to 100 shooting stars an hour

A spectacular meteor shower lit up the skies last night with 100 shooting stars an hour as the celestial firework display reached its fiery peak, the Daily Mail reported.

Sky-watchers across the world braved freezing temperatures to enjoy the Geminid meteor shower after astronomers said the weather conditions were close to perfect for the annual spectacle.

Shooting stars were seen streaking across the night sky just after midnight in London and past the Dover Patrol Memorial in St Margarets Bay, Kent.

The meteor shower was visible in both hemispheres and was spotted from Skopje in Macedonia to Washington in the US because of the clear skies.

At their height, the Geminids produce between 50 and 100 shooting stars every hour and they can be seen glowing in multiple colours with occasional rapid bursts of two or three.

The best time to see the meteors was around 2am, when the point in the sky from which the meteors appear to originate - was almost overhead, next to the constellation Gemini.

But meteors, which travel at more than 22 miles per second, should have been visible throughout the night from around 10pm as they burned up about 24 miles above the Earth.

Robin Scagell, vice-president of the Society for Popular Astronomy, said: 'It should be a good display, weather permitting - we might not be far off perfect conditions in the UK.

“The constellation is very high in the sky and most of the Moon will have gone away. An average of one
comet a minute would be a good rate, and that's possible. You might also get little bursts of activity with two or three together.”

Meteor showers occur when the Earth ploughs through clouds of cometary dust. The tiny particles, some no bigger than a grain of sand, burn up brightly as they enter the atmosphere.
Geminids are debris from an extinct three-mile-wide comet called 3200 Phaethon, which was previously believed to be an asteroid, according to NASA.

“Basically it is the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun,' NASA said on its website.

But it has an eccentric orbit that looks more like that of a comet than an asteroid and brings it well inside the orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, every 1.4 years.