The Leonid Meteor Shower
Meteor showers often vary in intensity from year to year
because they are
associated with crossing the orbit of a comet.
One shower that
normally is rather weak, but can at times be strong is the Leonids.
On the average it only gives 10 meteors per
hour--not even twice the sporadic rate. However, when the parent comet is near
perihelion, the Leonids can be spectacular.
A Tempest of Falling Stars
On November 12-13, 1833,
a "tempest of falling stars" was observed in Boston with a rate
"half that of
flakes of snow in an average snowstorm," while in 1966 the Leonids produced
"a hail of meteors too numerous to count" according to one observer, and 150,000
per hour for a twenty-minute period, according to another.
Newspaper accounts of the time reported that many people were
awakened from sleep either by the shouts of neighbors, or the light of the
meteors in the sky.
All Points of the Compass at Once
The image above depicts a portion of
a wood-cut engraving by
Adolf Vollmy based upon an original painting by the Swiss artist Karl Jauslin,
that is in turn based on a first-person account of the 1833 storm by a
minister, Joseph Harvey Waggoner. According to Waggoner's account,
"... it is not possible to give in a picture
a representation of the stars falling at all points of the compass at once. But
they fell in myriad's to the north,
east, south and west. Any representation on paper must at best be a very
limited idea of the reality."
