“The moon is a waxing gibbous around peak and will tend to wash out the fainter objects, but still, the Geminids are one of the top showers, so we can expect a pretty good show,” said Geza Gyuk, astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

“And it only takes one spectacular meteor to make the whole shower worthwhile to watch!”

The Geminids are unusual because they’re thought to be the only annual meteor shower created not by a comet but instead by a mysterious asteroid-like object called 3200 Phaethon.

Discovered in 1983 by a NASA satellite, Phaethon is a three-mile-wide space rock. Its year-and-a-half-long orbit precisely matches the appearance of the Geminids, making the body a prime candidate for the source of