By Frank Vandervort
“The night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall.”
—Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Last April’s total eclipse had many of us looking to the southern sky at that rare astronomical phenomenon. The following month, some of us in Southeast Michigan were out on our porches or in our yards late at night looking in the opposite direction, hoping to get a rare glimpse of the Northern Lights. This fall, we may have another opportunity to witness a celestial display—the Leonids. Each November, the night sky lights up with a meteor shower as the earth passes close to the Tempel-Tuttle comet’s orbit.
I have not always been a stargazer. One of my earliest memory fragments is from when I was about four years old. I was a croup-y kid, a condition that landed me in a hospital oxygen tent more than once. One evening, my mother, who worked late waiting tables at a Big Boy restaurant, returned home after her shift long after I’d gone to bed and roused me from sleep. I sat on the edge of the dining room table as she and my grandmother gave me cough syrup and slathered Vick’s Vapor Rub on my chest. As they did, they talked about flying saucers and about someone who had been abducted. I remember feeling scared and, for many years after, looked into the night sky with fear-tinged fascination.
Late in the summer of 1994, I was camping near the shore of Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park. I awoke in the middle of the night and heard coyotes yipping far off, their voices echoing through the lodgepole pines. I climbed out of my tent and walked to the lake’s edge. It was cold, the sky crystalline. A gibbous moon gave off an incandescent light that shimmered on the lake’s surface and threw a patchwork of shadow through the trees. I sat for a long time on a log looking into a sky that was polka dotted with an uncountable number of stars. As I did, I felt that tinge of childhood fear transform into awe.
Most years the Leonids give off a few dozen meteors per hour. Once every 33 years, the time it takes Tempel-Tuttle to circle the sun, the “shower” can become a “storm.” When this happens, the comet gives off at least one thousand meteors per hour.
The storm on the night of November 12-13, 1833 is legendary. Known as “the night the sky fell,” meteors streaked across the sky for nine hours, during which time it is estimated that from 50,000 to 150,000 fell each hour. That storm was, in the words of one historian, “the greatest celestial event in U.S. history.”
Writing in the essay “An American Land Ethic” from his collection The Man Made of Words, the Pulitzer Prize winning Native American writer N. Scott Momaday (who passed away earlier this year) explained that the storm of ‘33 “is among the earliest entries in the Kiowa calendars.” The tribe’s oral historians described some of the meteors that fell that night nearly two centuries ago as “brighter than Venus” while “one was said to be as large as the moon.” He continues, “So deeply impressed upon the imagination of the Kiowas is that old phenomenon, that it is remembered still: it has become part of the racial memory.”
The Kiowa are not the only tribe to point to the 1833 meteor storm as a cultural marker. Harvard historian, and former University of Michigan Professor, Phillip Deloria, has been researching the impact of that night’s display for years. He has documented how that storm was recorded on many tribes’ winter counts, a kind of calendar on which significant events in a tribe’s history were recorded on animal skins, and in their oral traditions—the Lakota, Blackfeet, Mandan, Pawnee of the plains, as well as Cherokee in the east. In addition to Native American histories, that night’s storm was recorded in the quilt work of enslaved people in the American South. Many Christians, too, noted the celestial storm, and believed the world was coming to an end or that man was being punished for having offended God.
The day after the storm, Yale astronomy professor Denison Olmsted sent a letter to the New Haven newspaper asking people to send him information about what they had seen—an act Professor Deloria has called the first crowd sourcing of scientific information. Artists documented the phenomenon in prints and woodcuts, and drawings appeared on the front pages of the country’s newspapers. That storm also lived in the memory of Carleton Watkins, then a child growing up in Oneonta, New York in the Catskill Mountains. Watkins recounted his memory of that night to a biographer seventy years later, after he had become one of the country’s first and most accomplished landscape photographers—an Ansel Adams of the civil war era. It was that night when the “sky was snowing fire,” he suggested, that had inspired him to a career attempting to capture nature’s beauty on film.
More recently, November 1966 produced another intense storm. On the 17th of that month, NASA documented that the comet threw off thousands of meteors per minute for about 15 minutes. Observers across the southern tier of the United States were astonished by what they saw. One of those was nine-year-old William Keel who lived in Nashville, Tennessee and described himself on a NASA website as a “proto-astronomer.” His father woke him at 3:00 a.m. to observe the dazzling display of fireballs that he documented in drawings. That experience, as well as growing up during the space race of the 1960s, led Keel to pursue a Ph.D. in astronomy. He explained, when I emailed him last summer, that he is a retired professor from the University of Alabama where he taught astronomy. In 2001, he viewed another Leonid storm with his then nine-year-old son, Nathan. He estimated that they saw 1000 meteors that night.
This year’s Leonid shower will take place from November 3rd through December 2nd, with the peak activity predicted to take place on the nights of November 17th and 18th. Astronomers also suggest that the pre-dawn hours of November 17th might be worth a look. This year’s show is unlikely to be anything like that of 1833 or 1966, but viewers are likely to see about a dozen meteors per hour. I’ll be watching. It should be well worth the loss of a little sleep.
If you are interested in learning more, visit NASA’s webpage on the Leonids at science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/leonids/. You can watch Professor Deloria’s excellent lecture on the cultural impact of the 1833 Leonid meteor storm at youtube.com/watch?v=LnHHmq-vx94.
Frank Vandervort lives and writes in Ypsilanti. He can be reached at fevandervort@gmail.com.
