LAST AUGUST, when my husband's friend Dale was visiting from New York, I read in the paper that the Perseid meteor shower was about to happen. Dale claimed to have never seen a shooting star, so we dragged him out to a hiking trail a few miles east of our Bay Area home to perform this summertime ritual. We kept him up until 2 a.m. We made him lie down in the dirt. After half an hour and a few wan streaks, Dale looked over at us. "You said it was a shower."

In the meteor shower of one's imagination, there is no downtime. You expect them to come in by the dozens, a catapult siege against the king's ramparts. You expect to go home stunned and awed and talking like Rutger Hauer on the rooftop in Blade Runner: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion ..."

Instead you say, "Guess we should have gone out later." Meteor showers often peak during the hour or two just before sunrise. Since few of us are willing to stay up until 4 a.m., we blame ourselves when the spectacle disappoints. As it always seems to. Very few people, when they read "as many as 110 meteors per hour," bother to do the math. That is just under two shooting stars per minute. For 58 out of 60 seconds, nothing save the slow seizing of muscles in your neck and shoulders is going on.

I took this up with Jack "the Star Gazer" Horkheimer, PBS's astronomer for the people. He sounded a little squirrelly, as if on some level he knew it is his kind who are responsible for perpetuating the hype. "I've said for over 30 years that the phrase 'meteor shower' is wrong," he told me. "It should be 'meteor sprinkle.'" He made a noise into the phone. "Sorry, I'm eatin' grapes and crackers here."

I decided to give the meteor shower one last chance. The Geminids, a winter shower, is said to be the most dependably impressive of the four major meteor events that happen each year when the earth passes through the trail of debris left by this or that comet as it orbits the sun. It is the only meteor shower that peaks at a semi-reasonable hour: from 1 to 3 a.m. Scientists think Geminid meteors are denser than average, so they burn more slowly, leaving long, lazy trails that last for countable seconds.

And this shower has a preponderance of bright meteors, or fireballs. Fireballs makes them sound bigger than they are, though. Most meteors are the size of a speck of pepper. One showy enough to be classed as a fireball is perhaps as big as a golf ball. In all cases, what you're seeing is not the object itself but the gases of the atmosphere illuminated by the friction of the object ripping through at 80,000-plus miles per hour.

For once, the conditions would be perfect: The night of December 13–14, the peak of the 2007 Geminids, would coincide with a nearly new moon. I found a spot in the Sierra Nevada, a four-hour drive from our house, that appears on a list of notably dark California skies posted on a Web site called Skykeepers.org. Specifically, Skykeepers cites the sky above the Alpine County airstrip, just outside Markleeville. So that's where I'd go.