Step outside after dark this week and you can watch chunks of an asteroid burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Behold, the Geminid meteor shower, which is renowned as the year’s best.

At peak Geminids, you could catch a shooting star every minute, and this year the moon won’t be bright enough to foul the show. That main action arrives just past 9 p.m. local time Wednesday and lasts until dawn. “The Geminids are rich in fireballs and bright meteors so that makes them very good to observe,” says Bill Cooke, who runs NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.

And it’s not only amateurs excited about this year’s show. Just a day after the Geminids peak, the asteroid behind the meteor shower, 3200 Phaethon, will pass closer to the planet than it has since 1974 — before it was discovered. Astronomers are ready; they’re hoping to get the best images ever of its surface and finally settle an old debate: How did an asteroid — instead of a comet — cause a meteor shower.

To sweeten the plot, the best images are likely to come from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. And on Tuesday, astronomers got the instrument’s planetary radar system back online for the first time since Hurricane Maria.

“It appears everything is on track, and they should have spectacular images,” says Paul Chodas, who manages NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program at JPL. “We don’t see many large ones like this getting close to the Earth’s orbit. It’s a fabulous opportunity.”

A Special Shower

All meteor showers are made of small, icy particles ripped from much larger objects — usually comets — that cross Earth’s path. As our planet passes through this debris, the particles burn up in the atmosphere, creating meteors. For example, ice chunks from Halley’s Comet create the annual Orionid meteor shower.

But the Geminids, well, the Geminids are special.