Right now, the stunning Perseid meteor shower is in full swing, and astronomers estimate that tonight the shower will reach its peak, where viewers can see as many as 100 meteors an hour!

This will likely be the best meteor shower of the year, so if you're into watching hundreds of falling stars in a single night, then you won't want to miss it.

To see it, you have to find the right time and place, and several apps can help.

Here's a list of our top picks.

LEARN MORE: How to watch the most incredible meteor shower of the year this week

UP NEXT: The best places to watch this week's dazzling meteor shower

Dark Sky meter App measures how dark the night sky is in your area.

App: Dark Sky meter App (Buy it for iOS here.)

Price: $0.99

When it comes to watching meteor showers, you want to get find the darkest skies possible. Fortunately, there's a new moon tonight, which means the sky will be empty of moonlight and therefore extra dark to spot the meteors. 

Dark Sky meter gives you instant information about the viewing quality of the skies in your area, which includes not only how dark the sky is but also if there are any pesky clouds in the way.

Star Chart shows you where the constellations are in the sky, among other handy features.

APP: Star Chart (Get it for Android here.)

Price: Free!

Each meteor shower is named for the constellation from where the meteors seem to appear in the night sky. The Perseid meteor showers, therefore, appear to come from the constellation Perseus, named for the Greek mythological hero.

So, if you direct your gaze toward the Perseis constellation, you should have a great show. Star Chart can help you find where the Perseus constellation — as well as any other constellation — is in your night sky at any given time. 

The Meteor Shower Calendar App will make sure you never miss another meteor shower again.

App: Meteor Shower Calendar (Get for Android and iOS here.)

Price: Free!

This handy calendar lets you know when a meteor shower is coming up. It will even tell you when the shower stars, when it peaks, and when it ends. It will even tell you the phase of the moon so you know how dark the night sky will be at optimal viewing time.

The Perseid meteor shower takes place from the end of July through most of August, but the best time to watch, when astronomers estimate you can see as many as 100 meteors an hour, will be in the wee hours of the morning, beginning at 4 am ET on Thursday, Aug. 13, according to Universe Today.

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The Perseid meteor shower put on an incredible celestial show this week as tons of fiery meteors crash into Earth's atmosphere and lit up the night sky.

The meteor shower happens every year starting in late July and lasting through most of August, but there is always a peak viewing time where stargazers can spot about 100 meteors an hour, and sometimes even "moon flashes" that happen when meteors crash into the moon.

This year the Perseid meteor shower peaked early in the morning on Thursday, Aug. 13, and it coincided with a new moon. With no moonlight to compete with, the meteor shower was even more brilliant than usual this year. So brilliant, in fact, that you could even spot a few meteors in New York City.

Still, a meteor shower looks more impressive far away from city lights. We've rounded up some of the best images of the Perseid meteor shower peak from around the world.

A Roman theater in the ruins of Acinipo, near Ronda in southern Spain.

Windmills at the San Gregornio Pass Wind Farm near Whitewater, California.

The Maculje archaeological site near Novi Travnik in the early morning of Aug. 13.

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The Perseid meteor shower occurs every year beginning in the month of July and extending through most of August. This year, the Perseids were most visible on August 12, 2015. Here is a time-lapse video of the stunning display of meteors, occurring once or twice every minute in the skies over Wales..

Produced by Emma Fierberg. Video courtesy of Associated Press. 

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The Perseid meteor shower put on an incredible celestial show this week as tons of fiery meteors crash into Earth's atmosphere and lit up the night sky.

The meteor shower happens every year starting in late July and lasting through most of August, but there is always a peak viewing time where stargazers can spot about 100 meteors an hour, and sometimes even "moon flashes" that happen when meteors crash into the moon.

This year the Perseid meteor shower peaked early in the morning on Thursday, Aug. 13, and it coincided with a new moon. With no moonlight to compete with, the meteor shower was even more brilliant than usual this year. So brilliant, in fact, that you could even spot a few meteors in New York City.

Still, a meteor shower looks more impressive far away from city lights. We've rounded up some of the best images of the Perseid meteor shower peak from around the world.

A Roman theater in the ruins of Acinipo, near Ronda in southern Spain.

Windmills at the San Gregornio Pass Wind Farm near Whitewater, California.

The Maculje archaeological site near Novi Travnik in the early morning of Aug. 13.

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 If you were driving through the streets of Bangkok in Thailand yesterday, you might have been lucky enough to see a huge fireball zoom towards the horizon, flash, and fizzle out, as a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere at around 8.40 am local time.

If you weren't lucky enough to be there, don't worry, because a whole bunch of people had their phones out so you can see it from all angles. And it is seriously cool to watch.

 While some witnesses worried that the explosion was caused by a mid-air plane crash, The Bangkok Post quoted Suparerk Karuehanon from the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, who assured everyone that it was likely just a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, and was never a threat to those on the ground.

"People should not worry because they are no larger than 10 metres and most of them entirely burn up in the atmosphere,"he said.

The president of the Thai Astronomical Society, Prapee Viraporn, later confirmed that the flash was caused by a "bolide"— or exploding meteor — similar to the one that flashed across the sky in Russia back in 2013, but much smaller.

That Russian meteorite was estimated to weigh a whopping 10,000 tonnes before it combusted into tiny pieces. "This is a natural, normal phenomenon because small meteors fall to Earth every day, but what we saw was similar to one over Chelyabinsk in Russia two years ago,"she said.

 The International Business Times reports that more than 100 people had gathered near the site of the explosion to look for fallen debris. So far there have been no reports of anything hitting the ground.

Fireballs and bolides are exceptionally bright meteors that can be seen over a very wide area. While they're of course easier to see at night, the brightest ones can also be perceived by the light of day, like the ones in Bangkok and Chelyabinsk.

When a meteoroid — which is a small asteroid or comet fragment that orbits the Sun — enters Earth's atmosphere, the visible path we see is referred to as a meteor, and a fireball occurs when the meteor hits a certain level of brightness. 

"Fireballs that explode in the atmosphere are technically referred to as bolides, although the terms 'fireballs' and 'bolides' are often used interchangeably,"says NASA.

Here's the one that streaked through the sky above Chelyabinsk on 13 February 2013:

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If you're willing to wake up before the crack of dawn, you'll get to see a spectacular celestial show this week.

The Orionid meteor shower happens around this time every year when the Earth passes through the tail of Halley's Comet. Chunks of debris from the comet burn up as they hit Earth's atmosphere, creating brilliant streaks of light that race across the sky.

The best time to see the meteor shower will start late at night on Wednesday, October 21, and last into the early morning of Thursday, October 22. The best window will happen just before sunrise on October 22, at around 5 a.m. EDT when NASA estimates you'll be able to see about 20 to 25 meteors per hour. (If you don't live on the east coast, you can use this sunrise calculator to look up when the sunrise will happen in your time zone.)

If you are in a dark enough area, you won't need a telescope to see the show. You should be able to see the meteors passing through the constellation of Orion, which you can locate in the sky using this guide from the Globe at Night.

However, you might be out of luck this year if you live in a big city, according to NASA.

"The Orionids will probably show weaker activity than usual this year," Bill Cooke, a scientist at the NASA Meteoroid Environments Office, said in a press release.

But don't worry if you can't spot any meteors. NASA is providing a live stream of the event starting at 10 p.m. EDT on October 21:

You probably won't be able to spot any meteors until at least 11:30 p.m. though.

If you don't want to stay up that late or wake up that early this week, the next meteor shower, called Leonids, will peak on November 18, according to NASA.

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NOW WATCH: This is what you're actually seeing when you watch a meteor shower

Harvard Physicist Lisa Randall explains how Earth could be in the middle of the 6th mass extinction due to human activity.

Randall has authored several books, including the recent "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs."

Produced by Ruchika Agarwal 

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This weekend is your chance to see an amazing and equally mysterious meteor shower called the Geminids meteor shower.

"The Geminids are my favorite," said NASA Astronomer Bill Cooke in a release, "because they defy explanation."

So, what makes this meteor shower so special?

For starters, astronomers only recently discovered what causes this shower each year. It took well over 100 years for them to figure it out, since the object was first seen in 1862.

It wasn't until 1983 when NASA's IRAS satellite helped identify the mysterious source — a small, rocky object called 3200 Phaethon.

Most meteor showers take place when debris left behind from a comet falls toward Earth, burning up in the atmosphere on the way down. The result is what we call shooting stars, or a meteor shower.

This year's Geminids are expected to generate up to 100 meteors per hour at their peak on the evening of Sunday Dec. 13. Click here to learn how to watch this spectacular event.

But, unlike normal meteor showers, the source of the Geminids, 3200 Phaethon, is not a comet, but an asteroid.

Of the 12 meteor showers that took place this year, only one other came from asteroids, according to American Meteor Society. 

The three important differences between asteroids and comets are:

1. Asteroids are located in the asteroid belt between the planets of Mars and Jupiter. Most comets are farther from Earth, beyond the orbit of Pluto.
2. Asteroids are made of metals and rocky material. Comets are made of ice, dust, rocky materials and organic compounds.
3. When asteroids move close to the sun, they retain most of their material whereas the ice in comets tends to melt and vaporize leaving behind a dusty trail that then leads to meteor showers like Orionids, which come from the tail of the famous Halley's comet.

Despite asteroids keeping most of their material to themselves, the Geminids is one of the most spectacular meteor showers of the year because there is so much debris falling to Earth, Cooke explains.

"Of all the debris streams Earth passes through every year, the Geminids' is by far the most massive," Cooke said. "When we add up the amount of dust in the Geminid stream, it outweighs other streams by factors of 5 to 500."

The reason for this is a complete mystery.

In 2009, a pair of planetary scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles tried to solve it, but ultimately found more questions than answers.

When the asteroid was extremely close to the sun, the two scientists noticed that 3200 Phaethon was temporarily shining much more than normal — almost twice as bright.

The explanation the two scientists, David Jewitt and Jing Li, came up with was that the asteroid must have ejected lots of dust — a large cloud of dust would scatter sunlight, making the overall object appear much brighter.

The dust must have been the result of rocks breaking apart from the asteroid due to the sun's intense heat at such a close distance, a phenomenon that Jewiit and Li called a "rock comet."

There was one problem with their rock comet theory, however: The amount of dust this incident added to the asteroid's debris stream was completely insignificant — about 0.01% of the total stream's mass, which was not nearly enough to explain the spectacular light show we see each year.

One reason Jewiit and Li proposed was that rock comets might have been more catastrophic in the past, spewing the tremendous amounts of rock that today make up the 3200 Phaethon debris stream.

"We just don't know," Cooke said. "Every new thing we learn about the Geminids seems to deepen the mystery."

For more information on rock comets and 3200 Phaethon, check out the NASA ScienceCast below.

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A dazzling meteor shower is happening tonight with perfect viewing conditions because the moon will be a very thing crescent, so its light won't interfere with the show.

Each December, we're treated to the Geminid meteor shower, but this year's will be a great time to check out the show — even for people in the city.

The Geminid meteor shower takes place throughout December, but the best time to watch — when astronomers estimate you can see as many as 100 meteors an hour — will be around 2 am early Monday morning on Dec. 14.

"If you live under the artificial skyglow of light pollution, you'll see fewer meteors, but the brightest ones will shine through," the editors of Sky and Telescope reported. Just make sure you have clear skies, which won't be many of us, according to AccuWeather.com:

The brighter meteors that Sky and Telescope is referring to will likely be what experts call fireballs, according to Mike Hankey, who is the operations manager for the American Meteor Society. Fireballs are extremely luminous meteors that shine as bright as Venus — the brightest objects in the night sky next to the moon. 

If you have clear skies and want to catch a truly spectacular show tonight, however, your best bet is to get far away from city lights. 

"Generally if you can drive 30 minutes or more away from the city, you'll be OK," Hankey told Business Insider last August, referring to that month's Perseid meteor shower. But the 30-minute rule applies for nearly every meteor shower. 

City lights tend to drown out most objects in the night sky, and that includes meteors. Here's a map that Hankey provided showing light pollution from city lights across the country:

"If you made it to an orange zone or better, you'd be able to observe," he told us in August. "Another way to gauge the light — if you can see some stars, then you can see some meteors. If you look up and see nothing, then you need to keep moving away from the city."

And if there's no good place for you to observe, then your best bet is to watch the online Slooh observatory's live broadcast of the show starting at 8 pm ET tonight, Sunday, Dec. 13. 

During the broadcast, Slooh astronomers Bob Berman and Will Gater will discuss the mysterious origins of the Geminids. You can ask them questions about all things meteor-related by tweeting @slooh on Twitter.

Check out the LiveStream below or on Slooh's webpage here:

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A meteorite fragment believed to be older than Earth itself has been discovered in Australia, and it almost washed away before scientists had a chance to get to it.

The recovery operation involved a network of 32 remote camera observatories, a mass of complicated geographical calculations, an aerial spotter, a remotely operated drone, two human searchers, and a whole lot of luck.

It all began on 27 November 2015, when the fragment was hurtled down to Earth's surface from space.

Locals in the William Creek and Marree areas of South Australia witnessed its descent, and it was also spotted by the Desert Fireball Network (DFN) - a series of linked digital cameras that monitor the skies above the outback and look for traces of incoming meteorites.

Once the rock had been spotted, the race was on to find it.

After some image analysis, triangulation, and other calculations, the search began in earnest around the Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre area - the lowest natural point in Australia - on December 29. An unmanned drone and a manned light aircraft were used to guide DFN team members, Phil Bland and Robert Howie from Curtin University, to the correct spot, with the assistance of a local search party.

Three days into the search, they found it: a 1.7-kg (3.7-lb) rock embedded in thick salt lake mud, some 42 cm (16.5 inches) below the surface.

If the researchers had been a few days later, heavy rains would've washed away the rock for good.

According to its discoverers, the meteorite fragment is a chondrite or stony meteorite that they estimate to be more than 4.5 billion years old - not a bad innings when you consider that Earth itself has been around for about that amount of time.

"It was an amazing team effort - we got there by the skin of our teeth,"said Bland.

Not only is it an exciting geological discovery that should eventually teach us more about the origins of the Universe, it's a huge boost for the founders of the Desert Fireball Network scheme.

"This meteorite is of special significance as the camera observations used to calculate the fall positions have also enabled the solar system orbit of the meteorite to be calculated, giving important contextual information for future study,"added Bland."It demonstrates beyond doubt that this giant machine that we've built really works."

The researchers believe the rock came from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, and now the serious work of studying the object can begin.

"The fact we have managed to retrieve the meteorite at all is remarkable,"said Bland's colleague, Jonathan Paxman. "Our people worked around the clock to reduce the data, enabling rapid recovery of something that would have been lost if we'd gotten there any later."

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Hundreds of people spotted a fireball streaking through the sky at about 6:16 p.m. Saturday evening, ABC news reports.

The meteor was primarily visible in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but there were also witnesses in Virginia, Washington, DC, Maryland, North Carolina, New York, Delaware, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ontario, according to the American Meteor Society.

Several witnesses, including Alex Salvador in Falls Churs, Virginia, captured the meteor's stunning descent on their car dashboard cameras:

"It seemed close, big, and definitely on fire with a tail," Salvador told ABC.

A "fireball" is a very bright type of meteor that is even brighter than the planet Venus appears from earth. A few thousand fireballs burn up in Earth's atmosphere every day, but most of them happen over oceans or uninhabited areas, or are invisible because they happen during the day when they are blocked out by sunlight.

Fireballs as bright as this one are rarely seen.

Many people reported the fireball on the AMS website, saying it had colorful fragments and looking like it "fell apart or exploded," according to ABC.

If you spotted the fireball, you can report it here.

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On February 15, 2013, many on Earth were watching for news of the approach of an asteroid labeled 2012 DA14.

Suddenly, those watchers – and millions of others around the globe – were startled by news of a superbolide, or super bright meteor, above the region of Chelyabinsk in Russia.

It seemed that day as if the heavens were gunning for us!

The Chelyabinsk meteor exploded at a height of 12 miles (20 km) above Earth, releasing 500 kilotons of energy, approximately 30 times the yield of the nuclear bomb over Hiroshima.

It caused a shock wave that broke windows in six Russian cities and caused some 1,500 people to seek treatment for injuries, mainly from flying glass.

Later, about five tons of meteoritic material reached the ground, including a 1,400-pound (650-kg) meteorite that was recovered by divers from the bottom of Russia’s Lake Chebarkul. Now, three years later – after more than 200 scientific studies – scientists say they’re still looking for the origin the Chelyabinsk superbolide.

They continue to confirm that it was not related to asteroid 2012 DA14. But, since asteroids in space are known to travel in pairs or groups, they want to know if the Russian meteor had a parent body, and if that body is a known object in space.

In other words, what do we know, if anything, about the origin of this cosmic close call?

To figure it out, they first have to determine the orbit of the Chelyabinsk meteor. Among the published studies is a catalog of 960 video recordings, much of it captured by security cameras, traffic cameras, dash cams – which are popular in Russia – as well as manual recordings made with the video cameras and webcams of those who saw it.

These images and diverse scientific data compiled during the event have let scientists calculate the trajectory of meteoroid after it entered Earth’s atmosphere.

And that information helps scientists calculate possible initial orbits for the 19-meter-wide (about 20 yards wide) space rock around the sun, before it struck Earth’s atmosphere.

On same day as the Chelyabinsk meteor – February 15, 2013 – the asteroid 2012 DA14 was still approaching Earth. It ultimately passed about 17,000 miles (27,700 km) above the Earth’s surface, 16 hours after the Chelyabinsk superbolide explosion and the fall of the large meteorite on the Russian Lake Chebarkul.

Could 2012 DA14 have been related to the Chelyabinsk meteor?

At the beginning, it seemed possible to everyone that these two events might be related. But astronomers quickly compared what was known about the orbit of 2012 DA14 with a preliminary orbit for the Chelyabinsk meteor, and quickly said the two looked completely different.

After closer studies of the two objects, they’re now believed to be completely independent and unrelated. In their statement on February 15, 2016, scientists said:

It was a mere, albeit very unusual, coincidence in time of two spectacular cosmic events.

Where in space did the Chelyabinsk superbolide come from? Did it have a parent body, and was that body a known object in space?

The answer is that we don’t yet know for certain, but scientists are still trying to figure it out.

One possibility is the asteroid 2011 EO40, which is known to have frequent close encounters with Venus, the Earth and moon, and Mars. Scientists said in their statement:

The common origin of both celestial objects is a possibility that cannot be discarded using the currently available evidence.

In the course of these studies, the scientists have realized that the Chelyabinsk impactor likely passed a gravitational keyhole on February 15, 1982 during a close encounter with our planet. At the time, the closest distance was about 140,000 miles (224,000 km).

As a result of this close encounter, the initial trajectory of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid was changed into the one that drove the meteoroid to strike the Earth over three decades later.

Bottom line: Scientists are still seeking the origin of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which streaked across skies over Russia on February 15, 2013.

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Earlier this month, on Feb. 6, a giant fireball came screaming through Earth's atmosphere. But the chances that anyone actually saw it are few to none.

This fireball likely exploded with the energy equivalent to 13,000 tons of TNT, but it did so over the Atlantic Ocean more than 600 miles away from the nearest inhabited region.

So, if no one saw or heard this enormous explosion — which, to date, is the largest since the Chelyabinsk meteor rampaged over Russia in 2013 — why are we so sure that it happened?

NASA was the first to publicly report the event, and you might think they would be the most likely to have made the discovery, but no. Even with all of its satellites and a program dedicated to spotting potentially harmful meteors, asteroids, and comets, NASA didn't actually detect the space rock, before or after it entered Earth's atmosphere.

According to Phil Plait— an astronomer and science writer for Slate — NASA was tipped off by another branch of the US government, possibly the military.

The government isn't necessarily interested in space rocks, but when those rocks make an unexpected and relatively large boom anywhere in the world, it tends to spark interest.

While the government isn't about to divulge how it saw this explosion, which was practically invisible to everyone else, Plait offered up a few ideas in his post:

"I can think of three ways to detect a big fireball in this case: Satellite observations, which would image them directly; seismic monitors, which can detect the explosion as the sound wave from the blast moves through the ground; and atmospheric microphones, which can detect the long-wavelength infrasound from an event. This may have been detected by any combination of these (though since it was over the open ocean, seismic monitors seen unlikely)."

With some back-of-the-envelope calculations, Plait estimated that the meteor was no larger than 23 feet across, before it entered Earth's atmosphere.

If the fireball had plunged toward a city instead of the Atlantic, Plait said it would have rattled some windows but, overall, left little to no damage in its wake.

Still, it's slightly unsettling to know that our technology isn't quite ready to spot these large fireballs ahead of time and provide a proper warning — even if it is just to say "Look up!"

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We live on a moving target in a cosmic firing range.

Each day, the Earth is bombarded by about a hundred tonnes of space debris. It may sound alarming, but this is really nothing to worry about.

Most of the objects that fall towards our planet are pretty small – typically about the size of a grain of sand or even smaller – and burn up in the upper atmosphere tens of kilometers above the ground.

But every now and again, something much bigger plummets Earthward and blazes a trail across the sky.

Some make the headlines whereas others arrive almost unnoticed. Here are the most interesting movers and shakers.

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1. South Atlantic meteor

On February 6, a chunk of interplanetary rubble, probably made of rock and measuring roughly five meters across, entered the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Hurtling across the sky at tens of kilometers a second, the air ahead of the meteor was compressed and heated, vaporizing the object as it penetrated deep into the atmosphere. At some point, as the meteor streaked 20-30km above the South Atlantic ocean, it exploded with about the same force as 12,000 tonnes of TNT (about the same explosive force as the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima).

Oddly enough, nobody saw this meteor explosion. We only know about it because of measurements made by various defence and scientific facilities that recorded the resulting atmospheric disturbances. The Earth is mainly ocean and uninhabited land and the odds are that most meteors burn up like this one, without any witnesses.

2. Chelyabinsk meteor

In contrast, some meteors grab worldwide attention. This fireball tore across the dawn skiesover Chelyabinsk, Russia, on February 15 2013. Moving at around 20km a second, the fireball was many times brighter than the sun and was captured by car dashboard, CCTV and mobile phone cameras across the region.

Estimates indicate that object was about 20 metres across and exploded with the force of 500,000 tonnes of TNT, shattering thousands of windows, leaving a trail of damage 55 miles on either side of the rock’s trajectory and causing injuries to over 1,200 residents in the region. Although this object exploded in the atmosphere, the Chelyabinsk meteor hinted at the damage that an airburst can inflict on a populated area.

3. 2008 TC3

This four-meter diameter object, weighing in around 80 tonnes, entered Earth’s atmosphere over northern Sudan on the morning of October 7 2008. Moving at about 13km a second, the meteor exploded tens of kilometers above the ground with a force of about 1,000 tonnes of TNT, lighting up the dawn sky as a fireball that was observed over 1,000 kilometers away.

Although not particularly well-known, 2008 TC3 was a notable first – it was the first object to be observed and tracked prior to reaching Earth. This means it provided a much-needed test of the process of detecting and tracking near-Earth objects. Other incoming meteors have been detected since, but the process is not infallible. For example, the much bigger Chelyabinsk meteor remained undetected until its arrival in the skies over Russia.

On Monday evening multiple people captured footage of what appeared to be a meteor in the sky over Scotland.

Police across the northern Britain received calls after a huge, bright flash was seen illuminating the evening sky at around 6.45 pm, with reported sightings in Scotland all the way to Newcastle in the north east of England.

Here's one video from the BBC:

Witnesses reported seeing a blue, green, or white light, while others even claimed to have heard a "massive" rumbling sound. 

Here's footage from another vehicle:

Torcuill Torrance, of the Aberdeen Astronomical Society, told The Press And Journal it was likely the flash was an exploding meteor. 

“The highest probability is that there has been an exploding meteor which has entered the atmosphere, heated up a lot, and exploded. This took place at 6.45pm and 46 seconds. It must have been a fair size to have been heard.”

Scottish Television weather reporter Sean Batty offered a similar theory. 

"There are no thunderstorms being reported anywhere in Scotland this evening, therefore this is not due to a flash of lightning. We do not have any cumulonimbus clouds in Scotland at the moment, which are required for thunder to develop. My only conclusion would be that this is indeed a meteor which has burned up and exploded during entry into our upper atmosphere."

He added: "The flash of light would be of an extraordinary level, and given tonight's full cloud cover this would have illuminated the whole sky."

The Met Office has confirmed the spectacle was "not weather-related" as there were no thunder storms recorded on Monday night.

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In the early morning of March 17, hours before the Saint Patrick’s Day festivities began, the skies of Britain were lit up by a bright blue-green meteor.

The fireball was spotted at around 3.16 a.m. local time across England in parts of the east coast, Stafford, Hampshire, and Battersea in south west London.

The meteor was also a particularly bright one. The Guardian reports that it is the brightest meteor ever recorded by the UK Meteor Observation Network (UKMON), estimated to have a brightness of -7 magnitude, and an explosion magnitude of -14.

Meteors can glow a variety of colors depending on their metal composition – yellow, orange, green, blue, or lilac. The blue-green color of this meteorite suggests it contained large concentrations of magnesium.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell the color of the meteor’s streak in the captured imagery as most of the footage is in black and white. However, sightings of the flash and its green tinge prompted many stargazers to tweet about the "St Patrick's Day meteor."

According to a tweet by UKMON, they calculated the orbit of the meteor as originating beyond Jupiter, although they are currently working on a more precise estimation.

"This is the biggest meteor sighting we have recorded," Richard Kacerek from UKMON told BBC News. "It lasted for a few seconds. It was seen for hundreds of miles. We have received a number of emails."

In fact, sightings and interest in the green flash were so high it caused the UKMON websiteto crash with all the traffic. Either that, or their astronomers had too many pints of Guinness.

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NOW WATCH: NASA scientists can’t explain this unusual 270-mile-wide ‘bite mark’ on Pluto’s surface

In the summer of 2014 a giant crater was spotted in an area sometimes referred to as the "end of the world." Now, 2 years later, scientists finally think they know what caused these massive holes.

Produced by Grace Raver. Original reporting by Sarah Kramer. Footage courtesy of NASA.

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In 2013, a fireball exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia. No one saw it coming. Even though NASA has been able to identify over 14,000 near-earth objects, its asteroid tracking technology is not completely ready to see everything that heads towards the Earth.

NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Officer Lindley Johnson told Headlines & Global News about the unsettling reasons why.

Produced by Ruchika Agarwal and Jessica Orwig

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British research discovered the disappearance of dinosaurs millions of years before they went extinct. Populations weren't multiplying as fast as they were dying off. What could have been the cause?

Produced by Emmanuel Ocbazghi. Original reporting by Jessica Orwig.

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NASA tracks more than 10,000 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) in space. Millions of years ago, one of these NEOs hit Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. No person has every been killed by one in recorded human history. Using Purdue University's Impact Earth and data from NASA, we calculated the destruction different size asteroids would cause if they hit land.

Produced by Kevin Reilly. Animations by Rob Ludacer. Special thanks to Julia Calderone.

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