The annual Perseid meteor shower occurs when debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle intercepts the Earth at a high velocity (59 km/s, 133,000 mph). This debris is somewhat diffuse, so we see activity for many days on either side of the peak. Like most meteor showers, this is named for the constellation its members appear to originate in: Perseus.
This is a composite image of 211 meteors collected between sunset on August 11 through sunrise on August 13. Since the images were collected over many hours, the radiant of the shower is not in a fixed location. However, because most of the meteors occurred between 2am and dawn, and because the radiant's high declination means it doesn't move fast, most of the meteors appear to point back to the same general area of the sky - just above the left center of the image. Note also that meteors farther from the radiant tend to make longer trails, since they have a smaller component of their velocity towards the camera.
We had a strong monsoonal weather pattern here during August, and many nights have been cloudy. Fortunately, the peak nights of August 11-13 were clear, although the Moon interfered somewhat. In this composite, the Moon has been digitally removed.
Long string-like images are stars or planets captured as they traveled across the sky over many hours. Jupiter can be seen trailing across the sky in the lower right corner. Bright star trails are evident for Capella, Aldebaran, Deneb, Vega, and Altair.
This graph plots the distribution of meteors on August 11/12 and on August 12/13. Local sunrise was at UT 12:15, with twilight starting about UT 11:15. The strong peak of activity at 08:15 on August 12 was previously predicted, and is the result of a debris filament shed by Comet Swift-Tuttle in 1610 (an important year in the history of astronomy, being when Galileo reported his discovery of Jupiter's four large moons, Ganymede, Europa, Io, and Callisto).
The hourly rate as given is normalized from 15-minute sampling bins, and is not corrected for either zenith position or camera sensitivity. Visual rates were higher than this.
Visual observations submitted to the International Meteor Organization strongly suggest a broad outburst of activity on August 13 between UT 5:00 and 7:00. This is weakly seen in the Cloudbait data, but nowhere near as strongly as seen in the IMO data.