Perseid and Leonid meteor showers
The most visible meteor shower in most years are the Perseids, which peak on August 12 of each year at over 1 meteor a minute. A useful tool to calculate how many meteors per hour are visible from your observing location is found here: http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/estimator.html.The most spectacular meteor shower is probably the Leonids, the King of Meteor Showers[10] which peaks on a day near 17 November. Approximately every 33 years the Leonid shower produces a "meteor storm", peaking at rates of thousands of meteors per hour. These Leonid storms gave birth to the term "meteor shower", when it was first realised during the November 1833 storm that the meteors radiated from near the star Gamma Leonis. The last Leonid storms were in 1999, 2001 (two), and 2002 (two). Before that, there were storms in 1767, 1799, 1833, 1866, 1867, and 1966. When the Leonid shower is not storming it is less active than the Perseids.
