Perseid Meteor Shower

Each August the earth runs through fragments from Comet Swift-Tuttle which are in a highly elliptical orbit of the sun. Small bits of dust from the comet, most smaller than a grain of rice, collide with the atmosphere creating a meteor shower. The meteors appear to come from a point in the constellation Perseus, and hence are called the Perseids. The colors of the meteor trails are due to ionization of gases in the atmosphere (green from ionized oxygen) and vaporization of the meteors themselves.