Enthusiasts in south Essex have been using £2million of state-of-the-art technology to watch meteors no bigger than a grain of sand burning up nearly 200 miles out in space.

Stargazing staff at SELEX Sensors and Airborne Systems UK, based in Christopher Martin Road, Basildon, borrowed one of the company's high-tech cameras to watch the Perseid meteor shower cascade through the Earth's atmosphere.

The celestial event was not visible to the naked eye in early morning light, but could be seen, using a series of high-performance thermal imagers developed by the company for military and surveillance applications.

Company spokesman David Urry said: "The SLXii Longwave Thermal Imager is currently a world-leading product, based around a Longwave detector made by SELEX in Southampton.

"Using its exceptionally high sensitivity and resolution, we were able to detect and record the meteors entering the atmosphere."

The shooting stars, known as the Perseids, are the remains of comet Swift-Tuttle and every August, they enter the atmosphere.

The comet has disintegrated, but a trail of particles from it, no bigger than a grain of sand is still travelling through space at around 138,000 mph.

Thousands of stargazers in the northern hemisphere spent Sunday night and the early hours of yesterday morning peering at a celestial Perseid shooting star display in the sky.

Although local skies were largely obscured by cloud, weather permitting, there will be more chances to catch this natural firework show tonight and tomorrow night.