In the pre-dawn hours of November 12,1833 the sky over North America seemed to explode with falling stars. It was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before and visible over the entire continent. The falling stars are from Leonid meteor shower, which occurs every year in November. The meteor stream associated with Comet Temple-Tuttle and it tends to increase in visual strength every 33 or 34 years. The 1833 meteor shower was one of the most intense of its kind with as many as 150,000 meteors per hour visible to the naked eye. People reacted with a mix of fear, awe and scientific curiosity to the 1833 Leonid meteor storm. Michael Shiner noted that the event"frighten the people half to death ".Denison Olmsted, a professor at Yale was promoted to study the phenomenon and appealed to the public for more information. The event was widely reported in newspapers with eyewitness accounts and scientific explanations. The public's interest in the event helped to launch one of the first crowdsourced science projects.
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