The night the stars fell from the sky

The image above depicts the Great Leonids Meteor Storm of November 13th, 1833, during which more than

72,000 meteors per hour fell to Earth and caused the night sky to glow so brightly with falling stars that

“people were awakened believing that their house was on fire!”

This famous engraving of the 1833 Leonid meteor shower was created by Adolf Vollmy for the Adventist book

Bible Readings for the Home Circle. It is based on a painting by Swiss artist Karl Jauslin, which was inspired

by a first-person account of the 1833 storm by a minister, Joseph Harvey Waggoner, who witnessed it while

traveling from Florida to New Orleans.

Engraving by Adolf Vollmy (1889)

During that famous shower, hundreds of thousands of meteors were seen per hour! It was the first

recorded meteor storm in modern times. Learn more about the 1833 Leonid meteor shower in this post.

This year’s Leonids peak on the mornings of November 17 and 18. The Leonid meteor shower is a

dependable annual shower, and the moon is out of the way, and bright Venus is in the morning sky

, rising shortly before sunup, ready to brighten your day no matter how many meteors you’ve seen.

On November 17 and 18, try to avoid city lights and watch between midnight and dawn.

Expect 10 to 15 Leonid meteors per hour.

Finally, this is a well-known engraving of the 1833 Leonid meteor shower.

some more meteor pictures

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