The favorite meteor shower of the year takes place Sunday night. The Perseid Meteor Shower reaches its peak in the earliest hour of Monday morning, just after midnight. The best time to look is after midnight, but you can look up throughout evening on Sunday and into Monday.. The Perseid meteor shower can produce upwards of 50 meteors an hour, though we've never seen that many. It is just a great meteor shower at the best time of the year, when it is fairly warm outside.

The nights ahead will be ideal for look for shooting stars and even the Milky Way. The moon will not interfere, as it reaches New Moon phase on Sunday. If the weather cooperates, these nights are ideal for stepping out with a beverage and sitting on a beach chair. Look up, you may see a shooting star flying overhead.

Venus, the brightest planet in the evening sky is getting easier to see. Have you seen it yet? Venus sets almost an hour after the sun. It is so close to the setting sun, you need a clear view of the horizon and maybe some luck. Look only after the sun has set, perhaps almost a half hour.

This weekend's brilliant full moon is another low one. We are well into the height of summer and that spells full moons that are low in our southern sky. Tomorrow night's full moon is in the zodiacal constellation Sagittarius. For those walking South Beach, this moon could be a memorable sight for you and who ever you share the walk. The moon is low and lights a glittering trail along the ocean to your feet on the shoreline.

Throughout the night, the moon stays low and south of us, rising first in the southeast after sunset and setting in the morning just before the sun rises.

Tomorrow night's first quarter moon appears in the zodiacal constellation Virgo, close to the right star Spica. Spica is one of the brightest stars of late spring and early summer. Use the moon to much valued celestial object. Spica is so large compared to our sun and voluminous too. The star is really two stars, one seven times bigger than our sun and the other is four times.

Their brilliance, hard to imagine, is 12,000 times brighter than our sun. The star is 250 light years away, one of the farthest bright stars in our sky.

Gus Ben David is an Island institution. For 30 years he has directed Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary. Anyone walking the trails gets a sense of a wild place that is tended by loving hands. The open grassland is mowed at strategic times of year. Waterfowl find refuge in the small duck pond at the far end of the property.

It takes a warm-blooded naturalist to run a den of cold-blooded creatures. Gus and Shane Ben David’s World of Reptiles is now in its third year. These are the animals that will never be friendly, but they do get along. They range in size from a 21-foot, 230-pound reticulated python down to a bullfrog from Cape Cod.

Enjoy these mostly moonless nights in the week ahead. The stars and even the Milky Way are within reach, as long as the skies are clear.

Without a moon in the sky, nights do get dark. You can see the Milky Way, that ribbon of billions of stars rising in the east.  The waving ribbon starts above the horizon in the northeastern sky, rises up high into the sky and extends down to the southeast.

If you are out looking for fireworks on Thursday, July 4th evening, make sure you look up for stars. The stage is set for summer stars. The bright orange star Arcturus is nearly overhead. You know you've found it when you look up and see the Big Dipper. The handle stars in the Big Dipper point to Arcturus.

Look for Spica, the brightest star low in the southern sky. The star is the main star in the zodiacal constellation Virgo.

Tomorrow night's full moon is in the constellation Sagittarius, the southernmost zodiacal constellation. The full moon doesn't get any more southerly and close to the southern horizon on nights around the summer solstice.

This should make sense as we already know the sun is now at its highest in the sky, in the zodiacal constellation Taurus, near Gemini.