HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

190 years ago, Bostonians awoke to an unexpected light in the sky before dawn on November 13, 1833. Some began their morning routines, thinking the sun had risen, a few dashed outside to douse the fire they expected to see consuming a neighbor’s house, and some simply looked out the window in curiosity. When they looked up to the heavens, they saw an unparalleled celestial spectacle. A meteor shower of unprecedented intensity erupted in the night sky, filling it with tens of thousands of shooting stars per hour, which observers said fell as thickly as snowflakes in a winter storm. Star Wars fans might picture the Eye of Aldhani from episode 6 of Andor, a spectacular feat of special effects that allowed the protagonists to make their escape from the empire during a meteor shower that lit up the sky. The real 1833 meteor shower was no less spectacular. The event, which came to be known as the Leonid meteor storm, was one of the most remarkable astronomical events in recorded history, both because of its breathtaking beauty and its importance to the development of science.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/287/

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• Professor Denison Olmsted’s “Observations on the Meteors of November 13th, 1833” from The American Journal of Science and Arts
• Professor Olmsted crowdsources meteor observations in the 1833 Mechanics’ Magazine, and Journal of the Mechanics’ Institute
• A disinterested entry about the meteors in the diary of John Quincy Adams
• Newspaper accounts
  • The Nov 21, 1833 Litchfield (CT) Enquirer reprints an account from the Boston Transcript
  • The Nov 23, 1833 Northern Star (RI) describes someone who thought the light of the meteors was a house on fire
  • The Nov 28, 1833 Newport (RI) Herald notes past meteor showers on November 13, going back decades
  • The Nov 26, 1833 New Hampshire Gazette reports on meteorite fragments believed to have been found on the surface
  • The Nov 26, 1834 Newport (RI) Herald contains a version Professor Olmsted’s observations on the meteor shower meant for general audiences, presented for the anniversary of the event
• Sidney Perley’s 1891 Historic Storms of New England
• Helen Sawyer Hogg, “Out of Old Books (The Leonid Shower of 1833),” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 56, 1962
• David W Hughes, “The World’s Most Famous Meteor Shower Picture,” Earth, Moon, and Planets, Vol. 68, 1995
• Bob Riddle, “Discovering the Leonids,” Science Scope, vol. 22, 1998
• Mark Littmann, Todd Suomela, “Crowdsourcing, the great meteor storm of 1833, and the founding of meteor science,” Endeavour, Vol. 38, 2014
• Tips from NASA on how to see the 2023 Leonids, which will peak on the night of November 17.
• Citizen Science: Get Involved!
  • Neponset River Community Water Monitoring Network, tracing pollution sources to improve water quality for wildlife and recreation
  • Project PHAEDRA, transcribing the papers of the women who worked as human computers at the Harvard Observatory