The Meeteetse Museums invites the public to travel to the Lower Sunshine Reservoir Friday night for a viewing of the Perseid meteor shower.

“To view the Perseids, simply bring yourself, a lawn chair or comfy blanket to lay on, warm clothes and watch the sky!” organizers said.

Starting at 8 p.m., Alan Corey of the Casper Astronomy Club will act as the group’s guide of the night skies, with one telescope available for guided use. Participants are encouraged to bring their own telescopes if they have them. Attendees are asked to be on time so their headlights don’t impair others’ views of the night skies.

The Perseids are fragments from a comet named Comet Swift-Tuttle that completes a single orbit around the sun every 133 years. Every year, the Earth passes near the path of the comet, and the debris left behind by Swift-Tuttle shows up as meteors in the sky, NASA says. The Perseid meteor shower consists of fast, bright meteors, persistent trains and some fireballs.

“The Perseids will appear as quick, small streaks of light,” NASA wrote in a blog post last month. “They get their name because they look like they’re coming from the direction of the constellation Perseus (near Aries and Taurus in the night sky), but Perseids in that area can be hard to spot from the perspective of Earth.”

Best seen in the early morning hours of the peak day — such as from 1-4 a.m. Friday — it can yield between 50-100 meteors per hour.

“... it’s likely to be one of our most impressive skywatching opportunities for a while,” NASA advised in a blog post last month.

However, Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, cautioned that some people go out expecting 100 meteors and only see a few.

“The problem is that the 100 per hour is a theoretical number used by meteor scientists and does not convey what people are actually going to see,” Cooke wrote.

The often-quoted Zenithal Hourly Rates “overestimate the meteor rates people actually see — sometimes by a lot,” Cooke said.

NASA created an estimate of how many Perseids can be seen per hour in various locations around the U.S. For the Casper area, NASA is estimating that, amid very dark “country skies,” observers can expect to see a peak of 42 meteors per hour from 3:30-4:30 a.m. on both Thursday and Friday.

“That’s about one every couple of minutes — not bad,” Cooke said. “However, we are assuming you are out in the country, well away from cities and suburbs.”

Whether at the Lower Sunshine Reservoir or in your own backyard, NASA advises finding somewhere comfortable, avoiding bright lights as much as possible (including your phone) and giving your eyes some time to adjust to the dark — up to half-an-hour if possible.

For more information about the Meeteetse Museums’ event, call 307-868-2423.

(CJ Baker contributed reporting.)