Year of Meteors

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features an unusual painting by the Hudson River painter Frederic Church, picturing an “earth-grazing meteor procession.” The meteor was the inspiration for a poem by Walt Whitman, ”Year of Meteors.”

YEAR of meteors! brooding year! 
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds and signs;

I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia;

(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d;

I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;) ...

The old man on the scaffold was, of course, John Brown, who was hanged in December 1859 for treason after the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Researchers at Texas State have tracked down the details of the meteor.

A large Earth-grazing meteor broke apart on the evening of July 20, 1860, creating a spectacular procession of multiple fireballs visible from the Great Lakes to New York State as it burned through the atmosphere and continued out over the Atlantic Ocean.

“Any town that had a newspaper within all those states is going have a story on this,” Olson said. “We have hundreds of eyewitness accounts, but there are probably hundreds more we don’t even have.

“From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson River Valley, we’re able to determine the meteor’s appearance down to the hour and minute,” Olson said. “Church observed it at 9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman would’ve seen it at the same time, give or take one minute.”