Tail of crumbling comet returns for star-studded show of the year.

‘Round about midnight tonight, the sky will become the backdrop for the finest few hours of the year’s greatest display of shooting stars--the Perseid meteor shower. One a minute is not too many to expect.

“Perseid is the best of all showers to come each year,” says Bruce Fitzpatrick, an astronomy and geology instructor at El Camino College in Torrance and the original director of the college planetarium. “We are going through the pathway of an old comet, and the solid particles in space are very concentrated.”

Because the shower lasts for several hours, E. C. Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, calls it “a slow event for people who like to sit back and see something pretty . . . a low-level fireworks display by nature in the nighttime sky.”

If you want a guaranteed view of the Perseid shower, the experts say, you’ll have to go to the high desert or the mountains, far from city lights that make the meteors impossible to see.

But if you want to try to see them in the South Bay, try the sparsely developed southern side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula--or even a boat a few miles offshore. The best viewing time is early Saturday between 1 and 4 a.m. Saturday, although showers also occur on the three nights before or after tonight.

“The less inhabited the land, the better,” said Krupp, adding that on the south side of the peninsula, there is less development to produce light. This would aid in viewing the showers.

“I was in a boat two years ago, and the condition was perfect,” Fitzpatrick recalled. “It was three or four miles off Long Beach. We weren’t out there for that, but we saw them. It’s the luck of the draw.”

Krupp said the lack of a moon should help this year. “Meteors vary in brightness,” he said. “You won’t see the fainter ones if the moon is out bright, but this year, Aug. 12 coincides with new moon.”

He said meteors or shooting stars are flashes of light that occur when interplanetary particles collide with the earth’s atmosphere about 60 miles overhead. “They are destroyed, you see them burning up,” Krupp said. “It’s super-heated air.”

The Perseid shower occurs every year at this time as the earth passes through the cloud of particles left by a comet that was last seen in 1861. “The comet has traveled around the sun for many years. It is crumbling apart and leaving this material behind,” Krupp said.

Perseid is a misnomer for the shower, but it is a name that has stuck because of what appears to be happening. The name comes from the constellation Perseus, named by the ancient Greeks for the son of Zeus, who slew Medusa, a horrible woman with snakes for hair. Anyone who looked at her was turned to stone.

“Perseus rises in the northeast about midnight,” Krupp said. “Because of the way the path of the comet is, compared to the path of the Earth, it looks as though the particles producing the shooting stars are coming from the constellation Perseus. They really aren’t.”

The shower is best viewed in a semi-reclining position that will be comfortable for a long period. Warm clothing is advised as protection against cold morning air. Look in the general northeast direction. The meteors appear as a sudden brightening in the sky and leave a trail as they move.

Although Perseid is the best meteor shower of the year, there is another good one, the Geminids, about Dec. 13. They occur at about the same rate as the Perseid meteors.

“But it is cold in December and seeing meteors is not fun the way it is in August,” Krupp said.

What: Perseid meteor shower.

When: Northeast sky after midnight Friday.

Where: Away from city lights, southside of Palos Verdes Peninsula and offshore.