Tonight in 1833, the beginning of a bright show in the evening sky, one that was so bright and so busy, some people started to freak out about it.
This was the Leonid Meteor Storm, which in quieter years is known as the Leonid Meteor Shower.
It happens every November, as Earth passes through a cloud of dust and debris left by Comet Tempel-Tuttle.
Down on the ground, the leftover space stuff hitting Earth’s atmosphere looks like a series of little fireworks or streaks of light in the sky.
People have found these showers fascinating for years; there’s a Pawnee story about a fallen warrior, Pahokatawa, who was restored to life by the gods and appeared as a shooting star.
Some years it’s kind of a quiet even, bbut every three decades or so, when the comet’s orbit brings it closer to the sun, it starts to melt and drop a lot of debris back behind it.
And in those years, nobody is going to miss what happens.
That was the case in 1833, when all that surplus material made for a spectacular show in the sky.
Observers said the meteors fell almost as frequently as snowflakes in a winter storm.
The constant flashes of light woke up people who had tried to go to bed.
Those who knew what it was could enjoy the show, but those who didn’t might have been forgiven for thinking Judgment Day was upon them.
It’s said that Harriet Tubman took the meteors as inspiration to follow the North Star and help enslaved people escape to freedom.
Yale professor Denison Olmstead wanted to see just how widespread the storm was, so he asked newspapers to publish a request to the public: “As the cause of ‘falling stars’ is not understood by meteorologists, it is desirable to collect all the facts attending this phenomenon, stated with as much precision as possible.”
He used the observations people sent him to better understand that phenomenon; it was crowdsourced science way before we called it crowdsourcing.
More than a century after the storm, Frank Perkins and Mitchell Parish wrote a song in which a couple falls finds a love just as heavenly as the shooting stars that are streaking through the sky.
“Stars Fell On Alabama” has been a standard since the 1930s, it’s been performed by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Bing Crosby, and a dueting Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
All that science, music and history coming out of a single night.
Today in 2015, the Buffalo Bills faced the New York Jets in a washout of an NFL game, at least in terms of color.
As part of a special promo with Nike, the teams wore non-standard jerseys; the Bills were in red and the Jets in green.
To colorblind football fans, the two sides looked almost exactly the same.
And there goes somebody tackling… somebody else?
November 12-13, 1833: The Night the Stars Fell (Newspapers.com)
When Red (Bills) Met Green (Jets), Colorblind Fans Lost (New York Times)
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Image by Adolf Vollmy via Wikicommons
