Leonid Meteor Shower. Credit: Juraj Toth

Meteors, sometimes called Shooting Stars, are not stars at all, but small rocks burning up in the higher levels of our atmosphere.

Every day, around 100 tonnes of interplanetary material enters our atmosphere. Luckily, most of these objects are too small to reach the ground, and do not represent a danger.

However, some rocks are big enough so that they do not get totally burnt up. These fall all the way down to the surface and are called Meteorites, and are mostly metallic in nature.

Meteors are mainly small asteroids left over from when the Solar System formed, but some break off from comets, or have even found their way to Earth following large impacts on the Moon and Mars.

Although you can see a few meteors on any clear night, the best time is during a big Meteor Shower. These occur when the Earth passes through the trail of debris left behind by a comet. During a good shower, you may see as many as 100 meteors in an hour, however, on a typical night you can expect to see around 6 meteors per hour.