The annual mid-November meteor shower, Leonid, is expected to light the skies on Saturday. This year maximum will be of about 12 meteors per hour at around 11 pm EST.

North Americans will be able to see the dazzling event more clearly than others, due to the fact that the moon will set rather early and will make the perfect dark setting for the light show to start.

Leonid meteor showers took place from 1999 until 2002, amazing the sky watchers when they were able to see close to a thousand meteors per hour. The meteors reach huge speed, chasing through the atmosphere at about 44 miler per second.

Unfortunately, this year the meteor storm is expected to be less spectacular, since forecasters for NASA's Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign have said that its outburst will last one or two hours.

Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, has declared that there will not probably be any Leonid displays for more than 20 years.

The Leonid meteor showers are caused by the Tempel-Tuttle comet. Its 33 years orbit extends to the Planet Uranus.

The meteor storm is visible when Earth makes its way through debris left behind the comet. This causes that the particles in the comet’s trail to spark. Even is the particles can be very small, they look like meteorites which cross the ski, leaving gloving trails for a few seconds behind them.

The Leonid meteor showers are called this way because they are located in the constellation Leo, which is a mythical lion figure.