A meteor streaking across the sky. Photo credit: Nick Ares, Wikimedia Commons.
Meteors, sometimes called "shooting stars", are more common than most people realize. So long as skies are clear and dark, even on ordinary nights there are an average of 2 meteors per hour.
Meteors start out as tiny bits of rock floating in space. Earth's gravity attracts these bits of rock, causing them to enter our atmosphere and fall toward the surface of our planet. Since they have such a long way to fall, they reach speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. At speeds like that, the air around them actually causes friction, and so each bit of rock and the air around it heats up. Voila, that's what you're seeing when you see a meteor! (Most of them are so tiny--about the size of a grain of sand--that they actually vaporize before they get anywhere near the ground. Nonetheless, they and the air around them glows so much that you can easily see it as it falls.)
Every few weeks or so, the Earth comes near lots of bits of rock that have floated away from the tails of various comets in the inner solar system. When that happens, we have many meteors fall to the Earth at one time--usually over the course of one or two days. This is what we call a "meteor shower". Every August, right around this time, we have one of the best annual meteor showers, when for one night, about 60 meteors can be seen per hour. (Perhaps the word 'shower' is a bit of an exaggerated name--if a droplet of water per minute come out of your faucet, you'd call that a 'trickle' and not a 'shower'--but that's just what we call these events.)
There are meteor showers about once every 4-6 weeks, but some are better than others depending on the year. The August meteor shower, known as the Perseid meteor shower, is one of the most predictable ones. That means that it may not be the most spectacular shower (others can have hundreds of meteors per hour), but it's a decent show, and it's consistent. Other showers deliver numbers much higher than that some years, but in other years are much, much lower. For these showers, the number of meteors per hour are very hard to predict.
This year the Perseid shower reaches its best on the night of Thursday, August 12, though you can still expect to see some meteors on the nights before and after the peak. Either way, all you need to do is find a place away from city lights (especially street lights), let your eyes adapt to the dark, and lay back on something comfortable with your head to the sky. If the shower delivers, you should see about 60 meteors per hour, or an average of one every minute.
Here are some news articles containing further information:
"Perseid meteor shower will light up night sky this week"
"OC sky's alive with meteors"
