"Considered a minor but pretty show, the Lyrids generally produce up to 20 meteors per hour," said Raminder Singh Samra, a resident astronomer at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, Canada.

"However, they have been historically noted to produce meteor storms, when hundreds of meteors are visible per hour. The Lyrids have also been known to produce fireball meteors—generally rare events." Fireballs appear when relatively large pieces of space rock burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

(See a picture of a bright fireball that recently appeared over the Netherlands.)

For the Lyrids, the meteor trails appear to radiate from near the brilliant star Vega