'Double' meteor shower will light up the skies next week. Here's how to watch.

Stargazers will soon be able to witness a "double" meteor shower as both the Alpha Capricornids and the Southern Delta Aquariids peak next week. 

The twin-skywatching event is "just an amazing coincidence," Nicholas Moskovitz, a planetary astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, told Live Science.

Meteor showers occur when Earth's orbit intersects a comet's path. The rocky debris left behind by the comet burns up as it enters Earth's atmosphere. During the double meteor showers this month, Earth will cross the orbits of comet 96P/Machholz — which causes the Southern Delta Aquariids that will peak July 29 to July 30 — and comet 169P/NEAT, which births the Alpha Capricornids that will peak July 30 to July 31. 

For two meteor showers to peak within 24 hours of each other is "a little bit unusual," Moskovitz said. "But the idea of multiple showers being visible in a single night? Certainly not too uncommon."

There are more than 900 meteor showers throughout the year, which means that on average, two to three meteor showers occur per night, Moskovitz noted. 

But not all of these are "major" meteor showers, like the Perseids or Geminids, in which more than 100 meteors blaze across the sky every hour. Most meteor showers are minor, and astronomers are only beginning to study and measure these showers systematically thanks to newly developed instruments, Moskovitz said.

Meteor showers occur at regular intervals thanks to their predictable orbits around the sun. The small amount of annual variation in their intensity is determined by when comets release debris and how long the debris has been floating in space. Predicting meteor showers has significant implications for the safety of spacecraft and humans traveling in space, said Moskovitz, who heads the Lowell Observatory Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance (LO-CAMS), a network of cameras that monitor meteors.