I take the liberty of transmitting to you the account of an extraordinary phenomenon. At five o’clock in the morning, I was called out of bed to witness, in the words of the person who woke me up, the expression “it’s raining fire”. To my surprise, I found that statement apparently true; for, when looking out the window, I discovered the entire firmament splendidly illuminated by a succession of falling meteors (…) In size, these bodies varied from the size of the planet Venus (…) to a mere luminous point. They invariably left behind a trail of visible light for several seconds.” On the night of November 12 to 13, 1833, the sky of the Americas, from Canada stretching to Jamaica, swarmed with points of light at breakneck speed. Six days later, an article published in Huron Reflector, an Ohio newspaper, reported on what had happened. The piece titled “Remarkable Phenomenon” (“Remarkable Phenomenon), signed by “Messrs. Hapgood and Parker”, detailed the astonishment tinged with horror that had swept through the population.
At the time, knowledge about the origin of meteors was incipient, ranging between pseudoscience, myth and erroneous theories, such as the conviction that meteorites were atmospheric manifestations. The remarkable event on the night of November 12th to 13th, with the dizziness of more than 100,000 meteors per hour, marked the starting point in what would develop as the astronomy of these celestial bodies. Humanity has long looked at the night skies and discovered cyclical phenomena such as the appearance of the same periodic comets at intervals. Among them, Halley’s Comet, a paradigm of a space object with its orbit and return time determined in the 17th century. A discovery light years away from understanding the relationship between the approach of comets to Earth and events such as November 1833.
2023-11-13 00:42:08
#early #hours #November #13th #fire #rained #America
