Even today, most city dwellers are absolutely amazed when camping in remote areas when they just "happen to look up" and see the marvelous splendor of the brilliant stars and Milky Way. The truly remarkable sight of the inky-black skies of a moonless night is something -- because of the evolution of Henry's darkened street corner of 1833 to the intensely illuminated intersection of 2001 -- that would never be seen nor appreciated within the lighted cities of our modern times. In those dark skies ARE many objects that do not remain stationary like the familiar star patterns (constellations), but rather move in seemingly random motions against that field of "fixed" stars. It was not until after Henry's time that these interlopers of the night sky were recognized as anything but "vapors" in our own air.

The most common of these were the "shooting stars" of which maybe a dozen every hour might be seen by a casual skywatcher on the darkest of nights. Twelve such objects each hour would be a fine show for a city family under dark campsite skies, but how about 300 per second? Just like Henry Dowling.YOU might think the sky was falling at that very moment!

That is precisely what modern estimates suggest that Henry and all the townsfolk he could muster out of bed with his shouts of bewilderment witnessed that cold November night of 1833, the night the stars fell (or so they thought) from the sky.

There have been dramatic "meteor storms" many times since the evening of Henry Dowling's eventful walk, but that display was perhaps one of the strongest and best remembered.

Nor it certainly was not the first, and the following Leonid storms of 1866, 1933, 1966 and 1999 will likely not be the LAST such strong showings.

As you probably concluded from the pattern of the dates above, a very dense cloud of this interplanetary matter encounters the Earth roughly every 33 years to "make" this Leonid meteor shower. By 1899 the pattern had been confirmed and a disintegrating comet found in 1866 was identified as the perpetrator of this remarkable recurring display. So in 1899 astronomers predicted a spectacular event similar to that 66 years earlier, but it did NOT come. Unknown to them at the time, the comet cloud had shifted from the intense gravity of two great planets - Saturn and Uranus - as it passed them after 1866.

From lack of prehistoric recordkeeping, no one is exactly sure how long this event has been around. And because the total mass of the meteoroid cloud is not accurately known, it is not certain how many MORE times each November such extraordinary numbers of meteors might be expected to streak across the sky....what will 2001 bring?

We DO know that the first recorded Leonid storm was from the earliest skywatchers of Arabia, the same wise record-keepers for whom we thank for providing us with nearly all of the wonderfully-rich star names that persist until today. To them the year 902 A.D. was designated as "year of the stars" in recognition of the brilliant meteor display in November of that year. For many apparitions immediately thereafter little of this annual event was recorded. The civilized world was immersed in the Dark Ages of which medieval Europe was suspended in a time of ignorance and confusion. Thus, celestial events were of little concern throughout these times and little of the Leonid meteors was recorded.

It was not until November of 1799 that the world-renowned Prussian explorer/astronomer Alexander von Humboldt finally reported in his observations of the great storm of that year. "These fell like snowflakes from the sky," he wrote of the intense Leonid storm as he watched the spectacle from the dark and arid mountaintop skies of Venezuela.

And so it goes about every 33 years; some encounters are better than others. Most recently, the Earth passed through a very dense portion of the meteoroid cloud in 1966 when an estimated 100,000 meteors per hour were recorded during its peak over dark skies of western North America. Dedicated amateur astronomers and meteor watchers worldwide finally just quit counting and watched in awe as the "rain of meteors" increased rapidly through the night.

In fact, since the first recorded sighting of these meteors in A.D. 902, there have been 13 confirmed major storms of the Leonids, all coming within a week centered on November 18. So we are being teased even a bit more; can the year 2001 mark the 14th?

So what exactly is this "cloud" that the Earth encounters each year in November?

We now know these meteors are actually DEBRIS remaining from the disintegration of a great comet. The comet - Comet "Temple-Tuttle" (so named after the two gentlemen who simultaneously "discovered" the object) - was discovered in 1866, coinciding with the last truly great showing of this major storm. We now know for that this comet had visited our solar neighborhood prior to that time every 33 years, since the debris from it was recorded in Arabic "year of the stars" and likewise during the spectacular "Night the Stars Fell" in 1799 and again in November of 1833.

Comet Temple-Tuttle is what astronomers call a "periodic comet," one of hundreds that routinely and predictably continue to orbit the sun in a very narrow elliptical orbit until finally succumbing to the intense heat and pressure from the solar wind at each closest pass. As such comets approach and recede from the sun, their mass is gradually eaten away. The more dense particles remain as the gases are vaporized and pushed away from the sun's pressure.

No matter how large the original comet, it will eventually be obliterated by solar radiation, pressure and heat with little remaining of its original mass; the debris that is left in the wake of this cometary destruction is a cloud of "meteoroids" through which the earth may or may not pass in its annual motion around the sun.

Like this 3-year periodic "Temple-Tuttle" comet, the famous "Halley's Comet" is also a periodic comet with an orbit of 76 years; at each pass by the sun - a point of closest solar approach known as "perihelion" - it too is losing a tremendous amount of matter. The huge. This huge loss of material by the pounding energy of the sun is witnessed in the photograph shown from the GIOTTO spacecraft of the European Space Agency as it passed the comet on March 14, 1986.

But on exactly the same evening from our vantage point on this beautiful Earth, the comet appeared more serene and subdued; a ghostly apparition of mystery and beauty, as comets have always been known.

This debris from the most famous of all comets still lurks in the sky orbiting the sun similarly to the debris from Temple-Tuttle. Just as the disintegration of Comet Temple-Tuttle results in the November Leonid meteors, our earth intersects TWICE yearly the debris left from the demise of Halley's comet -- once each May which produces the dependable ETA AQUARID (entering the Earth's atmosphere from the direction of the constellation of AQUARIUS) meteor shower and again each October as the ORIONID meteors which appear to be coming from the constellation of ORION.

In our next installment, Part Four, we will see what the "experts" have forecast for the upcoming Leonid Meteor shower (storm?) for November, 2001. It appears that this might be a celestial extravaganza that you, your family and friends will NOT want to miss!