These beautiful videos of the Perseid meteor shower give you a ringside view of nature's annual fireworks

They show up every year, like a travelling circus performing one of the most impressive acts ever put together. They are the Perseids: Tiny chunks of rock hurtling into the Earth's atmosphere and burning up. They are leftovers in a sense, since the Perseids are the debris left behind by the comet Swift-Tuttle. When they crash into the atmosphere and burn up, the leave little streaks of light, turning into the most visible meteor shower the Earth sees – with one meteor per minute.

A year after they were effectively drowned out, visually, by a Supermoon, this year the Perseids coincided with a new moon, making it the best possible time to see the shower. Viewing the shower doesn't even require a telescope, and regular cameras too have captured them.

And if you'd like a slightly less beautiful video, but one that tracks the actual meteors much more closely, there's always this compilation put about by the US' National Aeronautics and Space Administration.