The Leonid storm, the night the stars fell

In the small hours over North America the Leonids came down at perhaps 100,000 meteors an hour, and the thin crescent Moon had set the evening before.

Denison Olmsted at Yale gathered reports from across the country and noticed that the meteors all streamed from one point in the constellation Leo, and that the point moved with the stars. That put their origin out in space rather than in the air, and his accounts in the American Journal of Science are where the study of meteor showers begins. The debris is now known to come from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, whose 33-year orbit is why the Leonids can storm roughly every 33 years. The Moon line is this site's own: at 4am local time in New Haven the 3% crescent was far below the horizon, and it was already down by six the previous evening.