It's too bad it's in the middle of most people's work week, but this coming very early Wednesday morning in our Butler skies, not only are we going to have one of the best meteor showers of the year, but the waning crescent moon will have a very close encounter with the planet Venus so close, in fact, it'll cover it up.

If you can get away with it, it's worth an all-night stargazing soirée, especially if you're lucky enough to be in the countryside gazing into super dark skies. If your reality is getting up for work that day, set the alarm for about 3 a.m. or so and catch the best part of the show. You can always nap later on, maybe on the boss's time if you can swing it!

First, I want to talk more about the meteor shower, namely the Lyrid meteor shower.

It's certainly not the best meteor shower of the year, but it's the fist major one we've had since early January. It happens every year about this time, and what is especially good this year is that moonlight won't get in the way and wash out the skies with light.

The moon this week is in its new waxing crescent phase and sets well before midnight before the Lyrids really get going. The peak of the Lyrids this year is Wednesday morning but really any early morning this week you'll at least some "shooting stars" in the predawn hours.

Meteor showers are annual events that occur as the Earth plows into a debris trail left behind by a comet or asteroid while in orbit.

The ammunition for the Lyrids is Comet Thatcher, which only swings by this part of the solar system every 450 years and last passed by during the Civil War in 1861.

Comets are basically dirty cosmic snowballs that orbit the sun in highly elongated orbits that take them really close to the sun and then fling them far out in the far boonies of our solar system. As they brush by the sun, they at least partially melt or sometimes totally disintegrate. This releases debris particles, usually no bigger than small pebbles. They spread out in the wake of the comet's orbit and become potential meteors if they encounter the Earth's atmosphere.

That'll be happening this week as Earth plows into Comet Thatcher's debris trails. We see these collisions after midnight and especially toward morning twilight because that's when you're on the side of the Earth that's rotated in the garbage trail from Comet Thatcher.

The reason it's called the Lyrid Meteor shower is that the meteors seem to originate from the general direction of the small constellation Lyra the Harp that climbs into the high eastern sky after midnight.

By no means should you restrict your meteor hunting to the eastern sky but rather lie back in a reclining lawn chair and roll your eyes all around the sky. You'll notice the meteors you catch all seem to point back to the general direction of Lyra the Harp.

By the way, meteor shower watching is a lot of fun if you have family and/or friends with you. The more eyes in the sky, the more meteors you'll see.

In most years, the Lyrid meteor shower yields about 10 to 20 meteors an hour, but if the Earth hits a really concentrated pocket of Comet Thatcher debris, you might see a lot more.

The shower also can show up in many shades of colors anything bluish and greenish to fiery red and orange.

Keep in mind these meteors are slamming into our atmosphere at speeds of more than 100,000 mph! A small component of the light you see as they streak along is caused by air friction and combustion.

Most of the light you see is caused by the particle hurling so fast into our atmosphere the atoms and molecules are temporarily excited in the column of air they're charging through. That's why the trail can sometimes last for a few seconds as the column of air chemically get its act back together.

As an encore to the Lyrid meteor shower, you can watch the very thin crescent moon and bright planet Venus in an incredibly close conjunction, or what I like to call celestial hugging. Look in the very low eastern sky around 5:30 to 6 a.m. You'll need a very low flat horizon. A high tree line toward the east might do in your view of the hugging.

Venus will be just off to the lower left of the moon, less than one degree away, almost touching it! If you look at Venus with even a cheap pair of binoculars you'll see Venus, just like the moon, also is in a thin crescent shape orientated exactly the same as the much larger crescent of the moon. In both cases, most of the sunlit halves of the moon and Venus are turned away from Earth except for a very little sliver.

As it turns out, the moon actually will pass in front of Venus just after sunrise, eclipsing our closest solar system neighbor. This is what astronomers called an occultation. This is a fairly rare event, but unfortunately this time around, it all happens after sunrise in the bright daylight. I think it's just too dangerous to try to observe it after that with a telescope or even binoculars because it's just too close to the sun. It's not worth the risk of accidentally pointing your scope or binoculars at the sun. You need your vision!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com.