Irish people urged to keep their eyes on the skies for largest celestial shower in 20 years tongiht

People are being urged to turn out their lights and look towards the skies tonight for what NASA are predicting to be the largest celestial shower in 20 years that has flown over Earth.

The Perseid meteor shower is an annual event, but this year's scenery is set to outdo anything that has gone before in the last two decades, with experts predicting that up to 50 times as many shooting stars will shoot across the Irish sky.

"This year is expected to be two to three times stronger than normal, because we’re passing through a particularly dense swarm of dust particles,” said Astronomy Ireland Chairman David Moore.

He explained that although they look like stars shooting across a sky, they are actually debris from a comet.

“They're just bits that have fallen off a comet goes around the sun every 120 years. It’s been around so many times that there’s now a huge swarm of particles all throughout its orbit, and we pass closest to that, a particularly dense strand, on Thursday night.

“We hit them at 100,000 miles an hour and they burn up as a fiery streak,” he said.