Too many people, I’m afraid, have the idea that stargazing is reserved for warm summer evenings. Nothing could be further from the truth as far as I’m concerned.

In the summer months you have to wait much longer for it to get dark enough. Honestly, my favorite time of year for stargazing is wintertime, with longer nights and those fabulous winter constellations like Orion and his posse of winter shiners.

Just about every year, right after the holidays, I load my van with my arsenal of telescopes and take a stargazing vacation somewhere like the Arizona desert.

You might think I go there to avoid the winter cold, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Winter nights in the high desert are downright cold. My winter coat and bomber hat are my best friends when I’m watching the heavens in the desert.

A great reason to don your cold weather gear under the stars is the annual Geminid meteor shower that is peaking this week. It’s one of the two best meteor showers of the year seen from Butler. The other one is the Perseids in August.

Monday night and Tuesday morning will be the absolute peak of the shower. It’s worth setting the alarm for and braving the elements, and if you can get out a little ways in the countryside it will be that much better with the darker, less light-polluted heavens.

This year’s version of the Geminids should really be good as the dark skies will be moonless in the early morning.

Meteor showers usually happen when the Earth, in its orbit around the sun, plows into an extended debris trail left behind in the wake of a melting comet that’s passed by this part of the solar system, maybe many times over the centuries.

The Geminids are different because they’re fueled by debris left behind by Phaethon 3,200, a messy asteroid loosely held together by gravity.

Phaethon 3,200 was discovered in 1983 and is thought to have a diameter of around three miles. It has a highly elliptical orbit that swings it by our part of the solar system every year and a half. Each time it passes it refreshes the debris trail. Most of this debris trail is made up of particles no bigger than pebbles.

As soon as it’s dark you may see more than 50, maybe even 100 meteors an hour, especially in the countryside. Even if you’re viewing from city or suburban-lit skies, you’re bound to see at least a dozen or so an hour if you work at it.

The best thing to do is lay back on a fully reclining lawn chair with lots of warm blankets and roll your eyes all around the sky, keeping count of how many meteors you see.

Meteor shower watching is especially fun with a group of people, because the more sets of eyes you have patrolling the sky the more meteors you’ll see.

Many of these meteors are slamming into our atmosphere at faster than 40 miles a second. These bits of dust and pebbles get incinerated at altitudes anywhere from 40 to 60 miles up.

Most of the light you see from meteors, though, is not because of combustion but from how they temporarily destabilize or excite the small column of air they’re charging though. That’s why you see meteors as streaks in the heavens, and some of the streaks stay visible for a second or two after as the atoms and molecules get their act together again and stabilize.

This shower is called the Geminid meteor shower because all of the meteors from our vantage point appear to be coming from the constellation Gemini the Twins, which is in the western half of the sky in the early morning.

However, by no means should you restrict your viewing to that part of the sky because the meteors will be all over the heavens. I don’t want you to miss any.

Bundle up and enjoy all the magic in the late fall, early winter skies. It’s so worth it!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at www.adventurepublications.net.