Breathtaking streaks of light and occasional fireballs blazed across the skies on Sunday as the Earth crossed ancient trails of comet debris, making the annual Leonids meteor shower a night to remember.
However, in Ireland cloud and geography conspired against us to prevent viewing of the shower.
Astronomers in North America got an excellent view, reporting brilliant hails of at least a thousand meteors per hour, while in China a group of skygazers said the spectacle gave them an eerie feeling of travelling through space. Elsewhere in Asia, though, cloudy weather brought disappointment for many. In Europe, daylight and the Earth's position combined to blot out the spectacular. Astronomy Ireland said the two Leonid "storms" occurred around 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. GMT.
We were on the wrong side of the Earth to see the second, for which the Far East and Australia had front-row seats, on the "leading side" of the globe.
"We didn't come round to the leading side until 10 p.m. Sunday and by then it was cloudy," explained David Moore, editor of the organisation's magazine, Astronomy and Space. Clouds allowing, however, night sky watchers should continue to see higher than normal numbers of shooting stars for the rest of this week, he added. Some 2,500 sightings an hour were reported in the US.
The Leonids occur every mid-November, when the Earth passes through the trail of debris deposited by the comet, Tempel-Tuttle, which flies past our planet every 33 years on a looping orbit around the Sun.
The dust specks burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, appearing as shooting stars, while larger pieces, a few centimetres across, burn up in a ball of fire.
They are called Leonids as they appear to come from the constellation of Leo.
This year's edition was touted as the best show for several decades because the world was traversing through three trails, left in 1767, 1699 and 1866.
The 2001 Leonid shower peaks were not visible from the Europe-Africa time belt.
That region is best placed for the 2002 Leonids, which also are expected to be spectacular. The problem, though, is that next year's storm will also coincide with a full moon, whose brightness will greatly diminish the viewing potential.
Calculating when the Leonids will peak, and how spectacular the display will be, is one of the toughest mathematical feats in Solar System astronomy.
The factors include the velocity and direction of the particles as they are expelled from the comet and the gravitational pull on them from nearby planets and the Sun.