PART II

“The Night the Sky Fell”

Fig. 2 - 1833 Leonid Meteor Storm over Niagara Falls

“…the day of judgment was believed to be only waiting for sunrise. … Impromptu meetings for prayer and many other scenes of religious devotion, or terror, or abandonment of worldly affairs, transpired, under the influence of fear occasioned by so sudden and awful a display.” [1]

One of the most spectacular—and to many, horrifying—celestial fireworks display of modern history, inspiring such terror in the hearts of North Americans as to ignite a religious revival the likes of which had not been seen in centuries, occurred on the night of November 12-13, now dubbed the “Great Meteor Storm of 1833.” [2] Not only did the event invoke terror in the more religiously-inclined populace, it also saw the beginning of “citizen science” whereby observations were gathered across the country in response to newspaper requests for more data by astronomer Denison Olmsted. Citizens across the country began to communicate their observations to Olmsted, leading to better understanding of where such meteor storms originate. [3] Since the time of Aristotle, who taught that they were “bubbles of gas lofted high into the sky [by wind] and ignited”, the notion that “stones from heaven” originate outside the earth’s atmosphere was considered to be ludicrous. “Olmsted’s [own] contemporaries suspected the bodies were electrified by lightning,” but observations seemed to indicate that they originated from some point near the constellation Leo (hence their designation as “Leonids”). [4]

Figure 1 - 1833 Leonid Meteor Storm

“…meteors storming like a fiery rain…”

It wasn’t until 1866, however, that the annual Leonid meteor showers were connected to the newly-discovered Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, [5] which returns to Earth’s vicinity approximately every 33.2 years. [6] Once this connection was made, it was later possible to extrapolate its orbit back in time to what may be the earliest recorded observation by Chinese astronomers of this particular comet in November, 902 CE. [7] In 1866, it was the Eastern Hemisphere’s turn to be scared out of its wits; while somewhat less dramatic than the storm of thirty-three years earlier, it still struck fear in the hearts of many who were not expecting it. As far south as the Mediterranean island of Malta, “farmers and fishermen who witnessed the event were struck by fear”, while some described the event as being “like a shower of hail”. [8]

Fig. 3 - 1866 Leonid Meteor Storm

The next two appearances of Comet 55P were calculated to occur in 1899 and 1932, but due to weather in one case and probable Jupiter-induced perturbations in its orbit in the other, it was not seen again until 1965, resulting in brilliant display that Fall. [9] But the storm that followed a year later on November 17, 1966 was truly spectacular, as “a tremendous storm of tens of thousands of Leonids fell … in the central and western United States. … Within just two hours, observed rates increased sharply from about 40 per hour to … 200 per second!” Some estimates at its peak ran as high as “200,000 to 1 million meteors per hour”, [10] an awe-inspiring spectacle as “the upper atmosphere … blazed with meteors storming like a fiery rain from the Sickle of Leo,” witnessed “from such widely separated locations as Hawaii and Australia.” So prodigious was the display that it surely rivaled, if not out-shown, the 1833 Leonid meteor storm that so terrified an unsuspecting public. [11] Even in the 20th Century, one eyewitness stated, “The sky literally began to rain shooting stars. …It was obvious to us that this type of shower would terrify the ignorant, not to mention effects upon astrologers!” [12]

Fig. 4 - 1866 Leonid Meteor Storm

Today, in the 21st Century, we’ve come to understand, and take for granted, that “meteor showers occur when Earth passes through the trail of dust and gas left by a comet,” sometimes years after the comet’s last perihelion. [13] While meteors can come from a variety of sources, [14] apparently annual meteor showers and storms originate from comets; [15]as debris from these elliptically-orbiting, rocky asteroidal bodies is discharged from the surface of comets during the perihelion phase of their orbits, it forms trails of material which periodically crosses the earth’s orbit, and when our planet passes through it, we are treated with a shower of “shooting stars” which, in the case of the Leonids, happens every year in mid-November (see Figure 5).

Fig. 5 - Path of Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, source of the annual Leonid Meteor Shower

The Leonids are just one of over two dozen annual meteor showers visible in the Northern Hemisphere, [16] and while we know the cometary source for many of them, some associations have not yet been positively identified, as they are believed to have been left behind by long-period comets that have yet to reappear; the α-Monocerotids, which are also seen in November, and the ε-Geminids of October, are two prime examples. [17] Indeed, there are potentially thousands of comets passing through our solar system, each one with a possible meteor shower or major storm in its wake.

At this point, you might be wondering what this brief discussion about the Leonids and other meteor showers and storms has to do with an event that allegedly took place some 3,000 years ago. The answer is fairly simple:

if, over the past 150 years or so, we have only just begun discovering the connection between such celestial displays and the comets that produce them, and…
since, for more than two millennia prior to the first of these correlations in the 1800’s, meteors and comets were not thought to be connected at all, and…
if such showers and storms could strike terror in the hearts of many well into the 20th Century, then…

…what would do you suppose would be the impression—on the minds and hearts of a warring tribal nation of desert-wandering nomads—upon seeing a vast storm of “great stones from heaven” falling “like a shower of hail” during one of the most significant events in their entire history, culminating in Joshua-ben-Nun’s command that the very sun and Moon “stand still” in the sky “for about a whole day”?

This will be the subject of Part III: “Great Stones from Heaven”.

Asteroid 3200 Phaethon

Asteroid 3200 Phaethon, the possible source of the annual Geminid meteor showers of late-December into early-January. National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory, Dec. 17, 2017

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1. Devens, R. M. (1879). Our first century: being a popular descriptive portraiture of the one hundred great and memorable events of perpetual interest in the history of our country, political, military, mechanical, social, scientific and commercial: embracing also delineations of all the great historic characters celebrated in the annals of the republic; men of heroism, statesmanship, genius, oratory, adventure and philanthropy. Springfield, Mass.: C. A. Nichols, pp. 329-336.
2. “The meteor storm made a deep and terrifying impression on the American people. … Indeed, the 1833 shower has been credited with contributing to the intense religious revivals that swept the United States in the 1830s, which permanently influenced the national character and spread new sects and denominations that are well established on the American scene today.” — http://americanwisdomseries.com/signs.html
3. It was also determined “to have produced from 100,000 to 200,000 meteors per hour!” — http://earthsky.org/?p=53077
4. https://voices.nationalgeographic.org/2014/08/30/1833-meteor-storm-star…
5. “Ernst Wilhelm Liebrecht Tempel (Marseille, France) discovered this comet on 1865 December 19. It was then in the evening sky near the star Beta Ursa Majoris. He described it as a circular object, with a central condensation and a tail 30 arc minutes long. Horace Parnell Tuttle (Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts) independently discovered this comet on 1866 January 6.” — http://cometography.com/pcomets/055p.html
6. “It was found that the orbit was of short period, 33.17 year[s].” — https://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/history.html
7. Credit for the first recorded observation of the Leonid meteor shower appears to be tied between this Chinese record from 902 CE. and an Egyptian observation recorded in 899 CE. (see also http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1994JIMO...22..200G and http://www.fallofathousandsuns.com/leonid-meteor-shower.html)
8. Galea, Adrian, "The Leonids of November 13-14, 1866, as Witnessed from Malta", WGN, the Journal of the IMO 22:6 (1994), p. 200.
9. “And indeed the 1965 Leonids produced rates of up to 120 meteors per hour as seen from such widely separated locations as Hawaii and Australia.” — http://genealogytrails.com/ill/stars.htm
10. Ibid. “But even the widely quoted rate of 150,000 per hour may be too high; in a 1994 reanalysis Peter Jenniskens (Dutch Meteor Society and NASA/Ames Research Center) settled on a relatively modest 15,000 per hour (Astronomy & Astrophysics, March (I) 1995).”
11. 11. Ibid.
12. “Observing the 1966 Leonids,” Denis Milon, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, Vol. 77, pp. 89-93. (Emphasis added) — http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1967JBAA...77...89M/0000090.00… — https://www.amsmeteors.org/2016/11/50th-anniversary-of-the-famous-1966-…
13. “Some meteor showers, like the Perseids and the Leonids, occur annually when Earth’s orbit takes our planet through the debris path left along the comet’s orbit.” — https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/skytellers/meteors/
14. “Most meteorites appear to come from asteroids. …based on a comparison of the composition of meteorites with our understanding of the composition of asteroids, [and] a comparison of the orbits of asteroids and the orbits of meteoroids… A few meteorites are from the Moon and Mars.” We will consider how meteorites could have come from Mars and the Moon in the first place in a later article.
15. As I have recently discovered, there are two notable exceptions to this “rule”: the January Quadrantid meteor shower, the radiant of which “is located where the constellations Hercules, Boötes, and Draco meet in the sky” (http://meteorshowersonline.com/quadrantids.html); and the late-December Geminids: asteroid “3200 Phaethon may be ‘the mother of all Geminids.’ Meteor showers are created when the Earth flies through a path of debris left behind by a comet. 3200 Phaethon's orbit nearly coincides with the well-defined path of the Geminid meteor shower, suggesting that this asteroid might be the remnant of a comet that released a trail of debris behind it, creating the path that is now responsible for the annual shower.” (https://www.space.com/39047-asteroid-3200-phaethon-close-brush-with-ear…) See animation above of asteroid 3200 Phaethon. (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA22185)
16. Another nine or ten showers are visible in the Southern Hemisphere, as well. — https://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-shower-calendar/
17. The Detection of a Dust Trail in the Orbit of an Earth-Threatening Long-Period Comet, P. Jenniskens, et. al., (© 1997, The American Astronomical Society). “Annual showers are also known from long period comets such as the parent of the epsilon-Geminids, for example, even though the one revolution trails can not presently cross the Earth orbit.” E. Lyytinen, Meteor Outbursts From Long-Period Comet Dust Trails (ICARUS, 2002, Finland).