While many Coloradans enjoy August for its long days full of sunshine, Mark Laurin has waited eagerly each of the past five nights for the sun to set.

With a 115mm APO refractor telescope and a camera, Laurin — an amateur astronomer from Silverthorne who is perhaps better known as Astro Mark — has been out each night capturing images of the star-filled skies. As one of the most prolific meteor showers of the year nears its peak, Laurin said Friday, that he’s seen an average of five meteors, or shooting stars, each night.

But as the Perseid meteor shower peaks this weekend, shooting stars could dazzle at a rate of up to 140 an hour during the highlights, Laurin said. Watching a meteor shower like this, he said, can make people feel connected to the vastness of the universe.

“It brings you awe and inspiration,” Laurin said.  “And what I mean by that is, have you ever seen a person see a meteor and not exclaim it? You get the ‘Oh my God!’ You get the ‘Look at that!’ That’s the one I hear most often.”

A member of the Denver Astronomical Society and the Astronomical League, Laurin is an adjunct instructor with Keystone Science School. Under the nickname Astro Mark, he leads astronomy and stargazing events in the local community.

For millennia, humans have connected with the universe by gazing at the stars, Laurin said. In a modern age when our whole world is lit up by technology, he said he’s on a mission to get people to “get out and look up at the night sky.”

“We need a sense of connection to something greater than us that we can relate to,” Laurin said. “When you think that throughout history, songs, poems, love letters, agony, wars, famine, were all dictated by the stars. People have turned to the night sky to try to figure out the human condition since the beginning of time.”

While many meteor showers are caused by an asteroid breaking up as it collides with Earth’s atmosphere, Laurin said the Perseid meteor shower occurs each August when the earth moves through the debris of the Swift-Tuttle Comet.

Like the Earth, the Swift-Tuttle Comet circumnavigates the sun, caught in orbit. But while the Earth completes a rotation around the sun in about a year, the Swift-Tuttle Comet completes a rotation every 133 years, Laurin said. The Swift-Tuttle last reached perihelion, the comet’s closest approach to the sun, in 1992 and will not return to that spot again until 2125.

As the Swift-Tuttle careens through space, it leaves a debris trail of dust, ice, silica and heavy metals, Laurin said. The Perseid meteor shower humans watch from Earth each summer occurs when the planet passes through the comet’s debris field, causing those particles that have been suspended in space to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

“Get a chair, dress warm, lean back, keep your cellphone in your pocket, get your night vision and enjoy the show,” Laurin said. “You don’t need a telescope. You don’t need binoculars. You’re scanning the sky. That’s why it’s so fun to lean back with friends and family and just enjoy the night sky.”

When viewing a meteor shower, darker is better, Laurin said. He suggested finding an elevated spot away from light pollution where stargazers can look northeast to the part of the sky where the most shooting stars will be visible.

Looking northeast, stargazers should search for Queen Cassiopeia, a constellation sometimes called “the lady in the chair,” that looks like a giant “W,” Laurin said. Like the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia should be easy to spot because it is composed of prominent stars that stand out against the night sky. As Cassiopeia rises over the northeast horizon starting around 10 p.m., meteors will radiate from below the left wing of the “W,” he said.

After the meteor shower’s peak Monday, fewer meteoroids will collide with the Earth’s atmosphere as the planet departs the Perseid cloud but there will still be shooting stars, Laurin said.

“It’s exciting. It’s unexpected,” he said of watching a shooting star. “They’re suspended for a moment, like, ‘wow.’ There is this break in their consciousness, like something has broken through and they’re part of something bigger than them.”