If you were up late last night or early this morning in Northern California, perhaps you saw the Perseid meteor shower. I read about it yesterday in the Chronicle, which advised heading to the Oakland hills for a good view, but I simply stepped out on my back porch in the city and was able to see some of the action. I saw one around midnight, then went out again at 5:00 a.m., when I saw three more in period of about eight minutes. Watching for meteor showers requires patience. You stare and stare at the sky until your eyes feel wobbly, and just when you think you might as well give up, you see a flash of light streaking across the sky. It’s pretty magical!

The Perseid meteors are named after the region in the constellation Perseus known as the radiant where, to those watching, they appear to originate. They are, in fact, the dusty debris of a comet named Swift-Tuttle that orbits the sun and flies through the inner solar system roughly every 120 years.

The comet was discovered in 1862, and astronomers last observed it in 1992. But each year Earth’s orbit carries it through the trail of particles from the comet – some are even as large as pebbles – that the sun’s violent energy has stripped away. When those particles pass through the Earth’s upper atmosphere they vaporize by friction into short-lived white-hot streaks.

If you missed this one, mark your calendar for the wee hours of September 1, when the Aurigid meteors will put on a show. “Sky watchers should be able to count almost 160 of the “falling stars,” according to Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute in Mountain View.