Shooting stars are a bonus of stargazing. If you watch the sky on a dark night for half an hour you should spot several brief streaks of light -- meteors. All you need is a blanket to lie on, a clear view of the sky on a dark, a moonless night and patience. Of course, kids dont usually have much patience, but it is amazing how they react when they see their first shooting star. So be prepared with a few things to talk about while the family is lying down staring up at the sky. Here are some "facts" that you can throw into the conversation.

Shooting stars are mostly grit from space colliding at very high speed with air molecules high up in the sky.

As Earth travels in its orbit around the sun it runs into clouds of grit generally pulverized rock that also orbits the sun. Many shooting stars are produced by grit no larger than a grain of sand. Some of the more spectacular ones are pea-sized and the really stunning (but very rare) fireballs are the size of an orange or larger. These objects collide with air molecules some 60 miles (95 kilometers) above Earth's surface and, due to their very high speed, they begin to glow white hot. We see a streak of light as they burn up. The scientific name is meteor but shooting star will do fine (just tell the kids that they are not really stars).

Occasionally a lump of rock survives the fiery journey and reaches the ground. These rocks are known as meteorites. They tell us a lot about the composition of the solar system.

On a typical night a shooting star can be seen every 10 to 15 minutes, but on some nights of the year a spectacular "meteor shower" occurs and shooting stars can be seen every few minutes or less. The peak of the next "shower" the Perseids -- occurs on August 12. Incredibly, the grit that forms the Perseid meteors comes from a comet. Though it happens less frequently, a "meteor storm" occurs when space debris falls at an even greater rate per hour.

Each time that a comet like Swift-Tuttle comes close to the sun, the ice on its surface starts to boil and chunks spurt into space. The ejected ice turns to vapor that is blown out of the solar system by the solar wind, along with very fine dust -- the source of a comet's "tail". But the larger grains are gradually spread around the comets orbital path. Each year our planet crosses the path of several comets and runs into grit, giving us periodic meteor showers and storms.

The grit that forms the Perseid meteor shower comes from Comet Swift-Tuttle and is travelling at 140,000 miles. (225, 300 kilometers) per hour when it collides with Earth. That is about 60 times faster than a bullet from a rifle. No wonder the collisions are seen as brief streaks of light. It is all over so quickly that you dont have time to say to others "Look! Over there." The usual expression is more like "Did you see that?" The speed of meteors is also a reason why telescopes and binoculars are not much help for casual observations. By the time you point the instrument in the right direction it is all over.

The bad news this year is that there is a full moon on August 15. This means that when the Perseids shower peaks on August 12, the moon will be visible for most of the night and the moonlight will swamp all but the brightest meteors. The best time might be the few hours before dawn, between August 10 and 12, when the moon will have set or be low in the west . At that time the constellation Perseus will be high in the eastern sky, near the bright planets Jupiter and Saturn. Look straight up and you should see the Perseid meteors streaking from the east towards the west and south.