After midnight, the Perseid meteor shower is gonna let it all hang down.

Late Sunday night till dawn Monday, the Perseid show will peak in all its heavenly grandeur some 50 to 60 miles aloft. It'll offer up quite the spectacle: meteors streaking across the sky in brilliant green-white flashes, a few even as exploding fireballs loud enough to be heard from the ground, all courtesy of celestial leftovers as small as a grain of sand traveling at speeds that would make an Indy car stall at the starting grid in humiliation.

As an added bonus, the moon will dim its high beams for the occasion. A new moon will mean dark, Perseid-friendly skies.

If there's a better excuse to be late to work Monday morning or go the distance and call in sick, we haven't heard it. The event also might serve as a body-clock tuneup for two other wee-hour celestial wonders in the coming weeks.

Perhaps best of all, the Perseids require no sophisticated gadgetry for viewing — in fact, they're best taken in with the naked eye.

Pull up a lawn chair and maybe a blanket, break out some soft music and look to the northeast part of the sky. As usual, it helps to get away from city lights and clouds; a dark, rural location with a clear view northeast is optimal.

Moorpark College astronomy instructor Hal Jandorf will host a free public lecture and meteor viewing at the school starting late Sunday night. The Perseid peak — around 120 meteors per hour, or roughly two each minute — will occur after midnight.

"It'll probably be the best meteor shower of the year," Jandorf said. "It's not just a factor of how many meteors there are but the high percentage of them you can see."

The Perseid spectacle, an annual August event, is probably the best-known and most reliable of all meteor showers.

It is so named because the meteors (or meteoroids) appear to emanate from the constellation Perseus.

"The Perseids are popular because they are dependable and because they come in a season when people are outside more," said Anthony Cook, astronomical observer at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. "What's nice about them is many of them are bright — like distant fireworks."

They can be seen now, but in lesser numbers; they typically are spotted starting in late July and ramp up in frequency to the peak.

If someone were to go out Saturday night to view them (so they could sleep in Sunday), they might see only half as many, Cook opined. After the Sunday night-Monday morning peak, they diminish rapidly and will be gone by Aug. 17, he said.

Fast and hot

The Perseids occur when Earth travels through celestial riverlike deposits of ancient debris left behind by the passing Comet Swift-Tuttle.

Debris particles, most no bigger than a grain of sand with some up to pea or marble size, can travel at more than 133,000 mph; that speed is the rough equivalent of driving from Ventura to Thousand Oaks in just under a second.

As the fine folks at Space.com explain it, the extremely fast Perseid particles compress the air in front of them, heating the meteors up to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The intense heat vaporizes most meteors, creating the long flashes that are sometimes referred to as shooting stars. But some of the larger ones splatter, causing the fireball flashes and explosions.

Most of this occurs 50 miles up or higher; very few ever reach the ground. It happens too quickly for a telescope or binoculars to be of much use.

The Perseids are among about a dozen meteor showers that occur each year, including the Leonids in November and the Geminids in December. The Leonids travel even faster than the Perseids and can erupt into full-fledged meteor storms of several thousand per hour, but they also can be a colossal dud.

Forecasting the intensity of any meteor shower is an inexact science, but the Perseids generally are the safer bet.

Meteor showers scarcely cause anyone to blink nowadays but were the cause of fear and panic in ancient times and even recent history. They caused people to think that the sky was on fire or that the stars were falling in a celestial snowstorm — and even sparked talk of end-of-the-world scenarios.

The intense 1833 Leonid event, for example, spooked carriage-pulling horses in the English countryside and caused bridge workers in France to put down their tools and gather their families for last goodbyes that were, of course, unnecessary.

In other celestial news

This weekend's Perseid event might also function as sleep-deprivation practice for two other upcoming celestial happenings.

The first, as Jandorf noted, would be the total lunar eclipse that will be visible in Southern California in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Aug. 28, from just before 2 a.m. to just shy of 3:30 a.m.

That one could bathe the moon in a weird, coppery glow.

The other is the Augurid meteor shower slated for the night of Aug. 31.

This one, seen only occasionally, occurs when Earth crosses the debris trail of Comet Kiess, Cook said.

The peak is slated for around 4:30 a.m. Sept. 1 and could bring 160 meteors per hour, though Cook noted that opinion is split on this one; some experts think it could be a dud.

The Augurid shower also is only expected to last about two hours.

But if it does come off well, Southern California "will have the best view of it of anywhere in the world," he said.

But first, bring on the Perseids.

It is, as Jandorf said, "a very, very late event" but it also could be very, very good. Such whimsy from the heavens, a welcome roll of the dice amid the dog days of August.