Although the meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, if you trace their paths, the meteors in each shower appear to "rain" into the sky from the same region. Meteor showers are named for the constellation that coincides with this region in the sky, a spot known as the radiant.

The average 'shooting star' is about the size of a coarse grain of sand and about 60 miles away. Normally, you can see 2 3 per hour on a clear night. When there is a meteor shower . there can 60- 100 per hour but on rare occasions, thousand per hour!