The next several mornings — especially Tuesday — set that alarm early and catch one of the best meteor showers of the year over Butler.

It’s the annual Geminid meteor shower, and if the clouds stay away it should be a good one this year because the moon will be out of the sky.

Meteor showers occur when the Earth runs into a debris trail of dust and small pebbles as it orbits around the Sun.

For most meteor showers the debris is left behind by a passing comet, but the Geminids are unusual because the debris trail was left behind by an asteroid dubbed by astronomers as 3200 Phaethon.

This asteroid 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. It’s a real cosmic litterbug!

And by the way, 3200 Phaethon is not one of those killer asteroids that’s expected to bash into the Earth someday, at least not for now. Eventually, though, a large asteroid will hit the Earth, maybe in 10 years, 100 years, or several million years from now. Who knows?

An asteroid or comet that hit the Earth 65 million years ago wiped the dinosaurs out and cleaned the slate for life forms on Earth.

Enough destruction talk!

Getting back to the Geminid meteor shower, it will peak Tuesday morning. You might also see a few meteors or “shooting stars” Wednesday morning after the peak.Meteor showers are best seen from midnight to morning twilight when our part of the Earth has rotated into the direction of the debris trail. A good analogy is driving on a warm summer evening (isn’t that a pleasant thought about now?). You get many more bugs that meet their demise on your front windshield than you do on your rear window.After midnight we’re facing through the “front windshield.” What makes the Geminids especially good this year is that the moon will be setting around midnight leaving the skies extra dark, especially away from city lightsIf you’re lucky enough to be in the countryside or make the effort to travel there, you may see well more than 50 meteors an hour and maybe even 100! Even if you’re challenged with suburban light pollution you’ll see enough of them to make losing a little sleep worth it.Some of these meteors are slamming into our atmosphere at more 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.Meteor streaks can also be different colors depending on what kind of gases they run into, how large they are and how fast they’re moving. In general, the reddish tinged meteors tend to be slower and faster meteors are more bluish.This shower is called the Geminid meteor shower because all of the meteors from our vantage on Earth appear to be coming from the general direction of the constellation Gemini the Twins, which is in the western half of the sky in the early morning.By no means should you restrict your viewing to that part of the sky, however, because the meteors will be all over the heavens. I don’t want you to miss any!The best thing to do is to be well layered in clothes, coats and blankets and lay back on a fully reclining lawn chair, rolling your eyes all around and 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. Dress warm and enjoy the show!

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 website www.lynchandthestars.com.