November 1833. As the night skies exploded and the stars fell on America’s Deep South, the slavers on one plantation in Tennessee – terrified of the end of the world – attempted to make restitution to those they had enslaved.
Every year, in
mid-November, the Earth passes through the Leonids, a huge meteor cloud
left behind by the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Each year sees impressive
displays, with certain nights offering particularly spectacular meteor
showers.
I
t is 186 years since
the Leonids put on that striking show over the US south, and it is still
remembered there as “The Night the Stars Fell”. The 1930s jazz standard
Stars Fell on Alabama immortalised the night.
“On the night of
November 12th to 13th, 1833,” wrote Victorian astronomy writer Agnes
Clerke, “a tempest of falling stars broke over the Earth.
“The sky was scored in every
direction with shining tracks and illuminated with majestic fireballs.
At Boston, the frequency of meteors was estimated to be about half that
of flakes of snow in an average snowstorm. Their numbers ... were quite
beyond counting; but as it waned, a reckoning was attempted, from which
it was computed, on the basis of that much-diminished rate, that 240,000
must have been visible during the nine hours they continued to fall.”
In Alabama, the
Florence Gazette reported there were: “thousands of luminous bodies
shooting across the firmament in every direction.
“There was little wind and not a trace of clouds, and the meteors succeeded each other in quick succession.”
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