The imminent Perseid meteor shower, the brightest and showiest of such events, could bring a light show of as many as 70 shooting stars an hour, experts say.

Sunday night into early Monday and again Monday night into early Tuesday will be the best times to see the annual meteor shower, they said.

A cloud of comet dust annually brings this shower, among the brightest and most reliable for sky watchers.

"The Perseids are the good ones," meteorite expert Bill Cooke of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., told USA Today.

Bits of comet debris produce fireballs that can streak across a third of the sky, burning brightly because of the speed with which they hit the upper atmosphere -- nearly 134,000 mph.

"It's also because of the size of the meteors," Cooke said, as many of the dust grains are about one-fifth of an inch across and burn brilliantly in the night sky.

Those dust grains are shed in the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle, which circles the sun once every 133 years and leaves behind a debris trail the Earth passes through once a year in its orbit around the sun.

The best viewing opportunities will be from midnight to dawn, especially after the half-full moon sets late Sunday and Monday nights, Astronomy magazine's Michael Bakich said.