On the night of November 12 to 13, 1833, meteors fall across North America at rates above 100,000 an hour. The storm leads to the discovery that meteor showers come from space.
The story
In the early morning of November 13, 1833, people across eastern North America woke to find the sky full of shooting stars. The storm peaked near dawn, with estimates of between about 50,000 and 150,000 meteors an hour. Many people thought it was the end of the world or Judgment Day. In Lakota winter counts, the year is remembered as the winter when the stars fell.
Denison Olmsted of Yale gathered reports from newspapers and letters and saw that all the meteors seemed to spread from a single point in the constellation Leo, which suggested they came from space, not from the atmosphere. Alexander Twining reached a similar view. In 1866 Giovanni Schiaparelli showed that the Leonids follow the same orbit as Comet Tempel-Tuttle, which returns about every 33 years. This made meteor showers streams of comet debris and opened modern meteor astronomy.
Why it mattered
Established that meteor showers come from space and appear to radiate from a point, the start of modern meteor astronomy.
Led to Schiaparelli's 1866 link between meteor showers and comets, a key step in understanding comet debris.
Showed how a mass public event could produce scientific data when collected from many witnesses.