The 1833 Leonid storm rained tens of thousands of meteors an hour and helped found meteor science

On the night of 12-13 November 1833, observers across eastern North America watched the sky catch fire. During the pre-dawn hours of 13 November, meteors fell at a rate NASA puts at tens of thousands - perhaps even 100,000 - per hour, so thick that one witness in Boston compared them to snowflakes in a storm. People were roused from sleep convinced the world was ending.

The spectacle did more than terrify. Until then meteors were widely dismissed as weather - flashes in the local atmosphere. But astronomers noticed every streak seemed to radiate from a single point in the constellation Leo, a pattern that made no sense for a mere atmospheric event.

In a real sense, the 1833 storm marked the birth of the modern study of meteors.

That clue pointed outward, into space. Decades of work traced the Leonids to debris shed by Comet Tempel-Tuttle, which Earth crosses each November. The 1833 storm reframed shooting stars as cosmic, not atmospheric - and launched meteor science as we know it.