Skygazers treated to spectacular Perseid meteors display

Meteors and star trails during the Perseid meteor shower seen from near Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Picture: PA

The Perseid meteors, shed by comet Swift-Tuttle, stage their show every August and are among the brightest of all shooting stars.

A clear sky gave most parts of the UK an opportunity to spot the meteors, said Met Office forecaster Marco Petagna.

He said: “There were some good cloud breaks, so many areas would have had a good chance to see them during the early hours. It would have been pretty good viewing.”

A meteor during the Perseid meteor shower seen from near Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Picture: PA

The meteor shower lit up the sky near Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Streaking flashes of light were also pictured online in the sky above Co Waterford in Ireland, while Professor Richard Betts, from the Met Office Hadley Centre, tweeted late on Saturday night: “(East Devon, UK) 4 in space of 15 minutes, sadly clouding over now!”

The meteors, mostly no bigger than a grain of sand, burn up as they hit the atmosphere at 58 kilometres (36 miles) per second to produce a shooting stream of light in the sky.

Seen from the Earth, the Perseids appear to originate from one place in the north-east known as the “radiant” which happens to be near the constellation Perseus.

Because the density of the dust cloud varies, the meteors are not evenly spaced out. At certain times they can be close together and at others seem to disappear.

The Perseids were the first meteor shower to be linked to a comet when astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli spotted their association with Swift-Tuttle in 1862.

The comet orbits the sun every 135 years. As the Earth crosses its orbit, it ploughs through some of the debris left by the icy object on previous visits. None of the particles are big enough to avoid destruction and reach the ground.