Many Britons stayed up well into the early hours with binoculars and armed with mobile phone cameras to capture the first night of the spectacle.

One even tweeted: "I'm being attacked by foxes but I'm staying up."

And while the shower was less spectacular than some had predicted there were still hundreds of tweets every hour from across the world.

Astronomers say that the showers will be most visible tonight, though cloudy skies across much of Britain will affect visibility.

Picture posted on Twitter by SJ Griffiths shows meteor in left top corner