The Leonid will be best visible in the early hours of the morning on Sunday and Monday, between 2am and 4am when the sky is at its darkest, for star-gazers willing to sacrifice some shuteye. There’s no need for telescopes as the shower will be perfectly visible to the naked eye – granted clouds stay away, that is.

Although the Leonid shower has produced tens of thousands of meteors per hour in the past, this year's event won't be quite as remarkable. Don’t expect more than 10 to 15 meteors per hour at best, and even those may be hard to see because of the bright moon in the Waning Gibbous phase.

The Leonid meteor shower is named after the constellation Leo (the Lion), and takes place every year when the Earth passes through the debris field left in the wake of the Temple-Tuttle Comet creating shooting stars, streaks of light in the night sky lasting less than a second as the cosmic debris burns up in our atmosphere.

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