Geminids 2014
The Geminids peaks on Saturday. Reuters

The meteor shower known as the Geminids peaks this weekend, and it will be the last such major meteor shower of the year. If you can't get away from bright city lights or bad weather hinders your viewing, there are other ways to observe the phenomenon -- with a Geminid live stream, courtesy of Slooh, as well as a chat with NASA experts on Saturday.

The Geminid meteor shower is no match for the summer's Perseids meteor shower, in terms of volume, or last month's Leonids, in terms of speed. But the fact that the moon is waning means stargazers will have a better chance of viewing a few shooting stars as the Geminids peak Saturday before dawn. The extinct comet 3200 Pahaethon, originally thought to be an asteroid, is responsible for the year-end meteor shower as Earth passes through the debris trail left by the comet during its solar orbit, NASA reported.

“The Geminids are very strange because they hit Earth sideways. It is the difference between being in a car and slamming head on into somebody as opposed to someone backing into you sideways, perhaps coming out of a driveway and crunching into you gently. These meteors hit us gently. While summer’s Perseids strike Earth at 37 miles per second, that's amazingly fast, and the Leonids are even a little bit faster, hitting us at just over 40 miles a second, these Geminids hit us at only 22 miles a second,” Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said in a statement.

This weekend's meteor shower gets its name from the fact that the meteors appear to originate from the constellation Gemini. EarthSky recommends heading out Saturday before dawn, preferably shortly after midnight. "The peak is typically centered at about 2 a.m. local time, no matter where you are on the globe. That's because the constellation Gemini -- radiant point of the shower -- will reach its highest point for the night around 2 a.m. (your local time)," EarthSky said.

It's best to get away from bright lights and find a location that blocks moonlight.

"As the night progresses the Geminid meteors will become shorter and will move in all directions, including downward toward the eastern horizon. Activity will also increase as the Geminid radiant (the area of the sky Geminid meteors appear to shoot from) climbs higher into the eastern sky," the American Meteor Society explains.

Slooh's Geminids live stream begins at 8 p.m. EST on Saturday and will provide views of the event from its observatory at the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands and from Arizona's Prescott Observatory. The team of astronomers will use low-light imaging equipment to better track the meteors and viewers can also listen to the "sounds" these objects make.

NASA will host a chat with Bill Cooke, head of the agency's Meteoroid Environment Office, from 10 p.m. EST Friday to 2 a.m. EST Saturday. NASA is estimating between 100 to 120 meteors per hour, while Slooh and the American Meteor Society have more conservative estimates of around 40 to 60 meteors per hour. The NASA live stream from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama can be viewed below.