A “streaky” meteor shower will be at its best over the next couple of nights. Unfortunately, this won’t be one of its better years. Even so, it should produce a “shooting star” every few minutes. The best view comes in the wee hours of the morning, when the shower’s namesake constellation climbs into view — Leo, the lion. If you trace the paths of the meteors across the sky, they all appear to come from Leo, so the shower is known as the Leonids. The meteors are created by bits of rocky debris from a comet that orbits the Sun once every third of a century. Earth intersects the trail of comet dust every November. The bits of debris ram into the atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles an hour. They quickly vaporize, forming the glowing streaks known as meteors. The trail is clumpy, though, with the biggest clumps near the comet itself. So every time the comet streaks through the inner solar system, the number of meteors goes up. Some years, the Leonids can produce hundreds of meteors an
