A METEOR shower will peak this weekend.

Known for their brightness and colour, the Leonids feature some of the fastest moving rocks of any shower, travelling at 44 miles per second.

Stargazers should still see about 14 or 15 meteors per hour if the sky is clear.

The show is best viewed after midnight and if you want to photograph it NASA recommends using a wide-angle lens to get as much of the sky as possible.

The space agency says the best way to view the show is to find an area well away from street lights, dress up warm and lie flat with your feet towards the east.

The Met Office says most of the UK will be covered in cloud when the Leonids come to their peak on Saturday night into Sunday morning.

The shooting stars travel at around 45 miles per second (72km/s) and around half of them leave visible trains that sometimes linger for seconds after.

The Leonid shower occurs when meteoroids, small rocks, fall towards the Earth after breaking off from the Comet Tempel-Tuttle.

These burn up and vaporise before they hit the Earth's surface – causing a streak of hot air which we see as a shooting star.

The Leonid meteor shower gets its name from its radiant, the point at which the meteors appear to emerge from in the constellation Leo.

Every 33 years, the Leonid meteor shower arrives as a storm of meteors, with more than 1,000 shooting stars an hour.

In 2034, researchers predict that observers will have a chance to witness 2,000 meteors per hour, in a 'Leonid storm.'

The next major meteor shower in the sky will be the Geminids in the middle of December.

This is the strongest meteor shower of the year with 120 meteors per second.