The night stars rained down on Dubai

Dubai: "Don't expect fireworks," warned the president of the Dubai Astronomy Group as we lay on our backs on a specially built platform in the middle of the desert, 40 kilometers from Dubai, on Wednesday evening.

At around 2.20 am after the Moon slowly set, we saw the first fragment from the Comet Swift-Tuttle vaporising and whizzing across the skies, leaving a brilliant streak of light and then vanishing.

Comets are mostly "dirty snowballs". They are made up of ice and rock.

Fragments that vaporise in space and our atmosphere are the shooting stars that make up the "meteor showers" or "meteor storms" we sometimes see.

"This shower is basically the debris from a comet," said Hassan Ahmad Al Hariri, president of the Astronomy Group, who was giving a running commentary about astronomy and the stars beyond while we were looking at the meteor shower.

It was hard to imagine that each shooting star was smaller than a grain of sand.

Al Hariri had earlier told us that we would see about 50 shooting stars in one hour if the weather was good.

But as our convoy of 30 cars reached the observation location in Lehbab, on the way to Hatta, it became very humid. "You need really dark skies, when you cannot see your hand in front of you, and good weather," said Al Hariri.

Though we were out of Dubai in a lonely stretch of land somewhere beyond the Murgham gas field, the lights from Dubai were still visible.

Wednesday night was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, which has also been called the "Tears of St. Lawrence". It is called Perseid because the point where it appears from is the constellation of Perseus. Most of the cosmic dust we saw on Wednesday night is more than 1,000 years old.

Earlier, Al Hariri's crew had set up a refractive telescope and we looked at the two atmospheric bands across planet Jupiter.

Beyond the planet we could see four of its moons, making it a very pretty sight.

Jupiter which is mostly made up of gas, has more than 60 moons.