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Just before dawn on November 12th, 1833, many living in North America observed a singular celestial event. Newspapers later described it in fantastic terms: “The very heavens seemed ablaze…”, “thousands of luminous bodies shooting across the firmament in every direction.”
Every November the trail of the Temple-Tuttle comet crosses paths with the Earth’s orbit, resulting in a shower of shooting stars, called the Leonid meteor showers.
The sheer number of shooting stars visible in 1833 was alarming, with observers in Boston estimating over 72,000 falling stars seen per hour (as opposed to the 15-20 witnesses expect to see per hour this year).
Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, among many others, witnessed this event. Many were fearful, as the science behind the sight was not understood and it was taken as a sign that the end of times had come.
The Lakota people were so moved that they reorientated their calendar around the event.
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