Will
The Meteors Storm Again? 19th
Century American Women Kept Watch
Brief historical background
At the beginning of the
19th century, no one knew that meteor showers were discrete meteor
groups arriving on specific calendar dates and that they came from defined
regions of the sky. A meteor
storm in November 1833 provoked an inquiry process that developed a knowledge
base about showers. That display filled
the sky with thousands of meteors and fireballs that left persistent trains
behind. Its eyewitnesses could readily
see that these ‘November meteors’ shot out of the sky from a small region in
the Leo constellation. Professor Denison
Olmsted (1791-1859) perused Yale College’s historical astronomical records and
learned that there had been bountiful displays the previous two Novembers. His curiosity about whether 1837 would also
see a return led him to organize a hybrid group of New Haven, Connecticut
amateur astronomers along with his Yale College students to stand watch and see
what happened in November 1837. Olmstead
reconstituted this ‘Yale meteor squad’ in succeeding Novembers and learned that
there were returns of the month’s meteors but in much reduced numbers compared
to 1833.
Fast forward to Olmsted’s successor at Yale, Hubert
Anson Newton (1830-1896) who performed a second library search in 1863. He learned that the November Meteors had been
giving storm performances for centuries, on about a 33-year cycle. Newton predicted that November 1866’s sky
watchers would see another storm and that good shows might appear for a few
years after as well. Just as Olmsted
had done, Newton asked local, national and overseas astronomers to watch Leo
and report their results to him. Newton
posted responding observers’ findings in Yale College’s American Journal of Science and Arts, which in the 1860s was a premiere
forum for research in the physical and biological sciences.
The debut of American women
By 1866 there were many
more American colleges with professors of mathematics and astronomy, including
a few institutions which were dedicated to women’s higher education. Among these were Mount Holyoke College founded
in 1837 and Vassar College in 1865.
One astronomer who
heeded Newton’s alert was Vassar’s Professor Maria Mitchell (1818-1889). Mitchell’s astronomical reputation was
established in 1847 when she discovered the first new comet to be found by an
American citizen. In 1866 and 1868,
Professor Mitchell assigned her students to stand watch in the after-midnight
hours of November 12 and 13. These
young women saw impressive meteor displays.
Mitchell informed Newton that seven students witnessed 354 meteors
during a seven-hour overnight watch on November 12/13, 1866. [1] Two years later, five of her students were
thrilled by a better show. Between 2:00
and 3:00 a.m. on November 14, 1868 they counted 900 meteors. By dawn they had tallied 3,766 during a five
hour watch! Professor Mitchell was on
hand for the 1868 meteor surge and reported to Newton that light flashes from
distant fireballs exploding beyond Vassar’s local horizon brightened the
moonless sky more than was usual. [2]
Another 1860s-era Leonid
witness was Sarah Robinson Trumbull (1829-1909) whose social celebrity derived
from her marriage to James Hammond Trumbull, a scholarly Hartford, Connecticut
man who had been elected to multiple state offices. She would have only been known in history as ‘Mrs.
J.H. Trumbull.’ if it were not for an early morning meteor watch on November
14, 1867. Her report of that watch in 1868’s
edition of the American Journal of Sciences
has preserved her identity as a citizen scientist as well. On that morning she monitored the sky from her
home’s east-facing window while her 10-year-old daughter Annie watched through
a northwestern-facing one. From 4:00 to
5:00 a.m. the two counted 500 Leonids.
Trumbull also noted that in one instant she had seen five meteors dart
out of Leo. [3]
Undoubtedly there were
many more women who witnessed Leonid showers in the 1860s, but did not know
who, or how, or whether to report the startling sky spectacles they had
seen. One of these was Caroline Fletcher
Dole (1817-1914). Her eyewitness
accounts about the 1833 storm and the 1865 and 1866 showers only surfaced
because her grandson Robert M. Dole, a prominent amateur meteor observer in the
20th century, mentioned them in a family history.
Leonid meteors were not
the only ones watched
When the November
meteors’ numbers waned in the early 1870s, fewer American astronomers monitored
Leo. However, 1872 had a surprise spectacle in store; meteoroids (rocky
particles) from disintegrated Comet Biela flooded that particular November’s
skies with meteors from the constellation Andromeda. This Andromedid shower did not prove to be an
annual one and so, attention to it lapsed after a while. Fickle November showers inclined meteor
observers to pay more attention to an annually bountiful one which was known to
occur since the 1830s. This shower, the
‘August meteors,’ later renamed the Perseid shower was observed by some young
Indianans in 1882.
D. Eckly Hunter (1834-1892),
Washington, Indiana’s High School principal brought his children and a family friend
out to keep a four-hour Perseid watch on the night of August 10 to 11,
1882. Hunter’s daughters were Mary and
Nora, 13 and 10-years-old respectively. Twenty-four-year
old Frank, Hunter’s son and 22-year old Naomi Sanford completed the party. Professor Hunter kept a record of the number
of meteors the party counted and arranged the data in 10-minute intervals. At the end of four hours the group had
spotted 521 meteors. Using the era’s
terminology, Hunter reported that “270 were conformable to radiants in Perseus
or Cassiopeia and 50 were unconformable.
Two hundred radiants were not determined but most of the number were
doubtless Perseids.” Just as today’s
meteor observers report, Hunter noted that the Perseids often appeared in
clusters with minutes-long lulls in between. [4]
The following year,
astronomer Daniel Kirkwood (1814-1895) summarized a report made to him about a
brilliant meteor, a ‘fireball’ that was seen by many Indiana villagers on
January 3, 1883. One couple, Mary E. (Johnston) Campbell (1836-?) and her
husband, John Lyle Campbell (1827-1904) witnessed it from separate locations. Mary made notes of the circumstances of her
own observation which she gave to her husband, a professor of mathematics and
astronomy at Wabash College in Crawfordsville. Campbell sent Kirkwood the
details of the couple’s independent sightings.
From the Campbells and several other people’s observation notes, Kirkwood
determined the fireball’s track over Indiana villages and its altitude and the
length of its path through the earth’s atmosphere. [5]
In 1881, Mount Holyoke
College was presented with an observatory containing an 8-inch (20-cm) Clark
refracting telescope. At the time, Elizabeth
M. Bardwell (1831-1899), was Mt. Holyoke’s professor of mathematics and
astronomy and director of the astronomy program. On the evening of November 27,
1885 she witnessed a second Andromedid meteor storm. She called it “an unusual ‘star shower’” and reported that “meteors were seen in all parts
of the sky, (because the) radiant was near the zenith.” She estimated the rate of the falling meteors
as “two to six per minute.” Bardwell
remained vigilant for more storm activity by holding another watch on the 28th. On the second watch she saw just a few
meteors from the radiant point in Andromeda. [6]
Marking time until the
next Leonid storm year
For several years after
1885’s reports about the Andromedid storm there were no meteor accounts in the American
astronomical press. It was as if American
shooting star observers had suspended routine watches and were waiting for the
next Leonid storm predicted to occur in 1899, 1900 or 1901. However, the meteor showers of 1866-1868 and
storms of 1872 and 1885 had helped increase American interest in astronomy. The groundswell of interest created an
expanded market for new astronomical periodicals. In 1882 Carleton College’s Professor William
Wallace Payne (1837-1928) began a new one, Sidereal
Messenger. After eleven years, he
created a successor named Popular
Astronomy. Increasingly,
astronomical research and developments began to appear in these two publications. At the same time, American Journal of Science deemphasized astronomical topics perhaps due to
the death of H.A. Newton and the absence of a successor astronomer to influence
the journal.
Looking for early signs
of the next Leonid storm
It wasn’t until 1895
that the Leonids were mentioned again, this time in Popular Astronomy. [7] They were the subject of a watch by Rose
O’Halloran (1843-1930), an indefatigable amateur astronomer who most often
monitored the cyclical changes in brightness of variable stars. O’Halloran recalled
that she had begun to suspect an early return of the November meteors in 1892
when she noticed, “an unusual number of meteors…observed about the 13th
of Nov(ember)…” So, three years later,
on the night of November 13/14, 1895 she decided to keep a “prolonged watch”
from 9:30 p.m. to 5 a.m. to check if the Leonids’ hourly rate augured an early
return. It was not until well after
midnight that the shower’s radiant was high enough in the sky so she could make
a valid estimate of its strength. When
only 18 Leonids appeared between 2:00 and 5:00 a.m., she concluded that the
shower was not about to storm imminently.
O’Halloran followed up
her 1895 watch by two more in 1896 and 1897.
The 1896 session revealed a promising moderate increase in Leonids: 44
were seen between 2:00 and 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 14th. [8] In 1897, a
brilliant gibbous moon which “glided nearer and nearer each night to the
radiant point of the Leonids” impaired an assessment of the shower’s full
strength because its fainter meteors were impossible to see. Nevertheless, O’Halloran estimated that those
meteors she could see were about one-quarter the number seen the year before on
the same date. Just as in 1896, this
result did not suggest to her that the shower’s meteors were about to storm
much before 1899. [9]
In 1898, Mt. Holyoke’s
Elisabeth Bardwell returned to meteoric astronomy by watching and sketching
Leonid meteors on a map prepared for the purpose and published in Popular Astronomy by Herbert Couper
Wilson (1858-1940), the publication’s assistant editor. Wilson published the maps expressly for
academic and amateur astronomers to document the paths November meteors had taken. When the paths were traced backwards they
converged on a mapped sky region that indicated the shower radiant’s location
in the sky. Bardwell’s published map
showed 42 meteors and Wilson commented that her results were similar to her
male colleagues’. All of their maps disclosed
an unsuspected characteristic of the 1898 shower: the radiant encompassed the
entire Leo constellation rather than a smaller defined area which was characteristic
of previous returns. [10]
1899: Showtime!
Popular
Astronomy’s index of articles for the year 1900 listed 11
astronomers who had submitted observation results for the 1899 Leonids. These
men had watched the Leonids from New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts,
Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri and Colorado and one observer reported from
Lisbon, Portugal. Stripped of all their
observational details, their reports supported and concurred with W.W. Payne’s assessment
of the year’s shower, in an article he entitled ‘Failure of the Leonids in
1899.’ [11] Too late, an Irish astronomer had published a warning to colleagues
that the planet Jupiter’s gravity had diverted the Leonid meteoroid stream away
from a full collision course with earth: compared to 1833’s flood of meteors,
the 1899 Leonids would be only a trickle.
Although they did not
make a summary judgment like Payne’s in their reports, several female
astronomers’ results mirrored their male colleagues’: the 1899 Leonids’ numbers
were meager. Anne Sewell Young
(1871-1961), Mt. Holyoke’s new observatory director and an assistant, Ella
Cecilia Lester (ca. 1874-?) saw only 21 Leonids during a two-hour vigil on the
morning of November 15. [12]
As it turned out, the
Leonid meteor rate per hour on the night of November 14/15 was better far to
the east, in India. There Mary Etta
Moulton (1865-1933), an American missionary and former astronomy student of
Payne and Wilson’s kept a Leonid watch 75 miles southeast of Bombay (now
Mumbai).[13] Moulton watched the sky for
almost seven hours beginning at 11:00 p.m. on the 14th until 5:45 a.m. on the
15th. During the interval from 1:00 a.m. to
5:27 a.m., she saw 84 Leonid meteors, for an hourly rate of 19, almost twice her
Massachusetts peers’ rate of 10 Leonids per hour.
Farther west in
Colorado the University of Denver’s Professor Herbert A. Howe’s students fared
no better even though their watch was held on the date of the predicted storm, November
16, 1899. Howe (1858-1926) had divided four coeds into two dyads. The first
pair, Mary C. Traylor and Grace M. Sater counted five Leonids between 1:00 and
3:00 a.m. Nearby them the second team, Bertha
Brooks and Elise C. Jones, saw 14 between 1:00 and 5:00 a.m. [14] Clearly none of them witnessed a much hoped-for meteor storm with
thousands of shooting stars per hour.
The same story prevailed all around the United States and abroad.
No better on the cusp
of the 20th century
Even though 1899’s
shower was such a debacle, some astronomers believed it was possible that 1900
or 1901’s could be splendid. Vassar
College astronomy students made a maximum effort to detect a storm if it was to
occur in 1900. Groups of them kept watch
from 1:00 to 5:00 a.m. on the mornings of November 14 and 15. The young women counted 42 Leonids on the 14th
and 50 on the 15th for average hourly rates of no more than 13
shower meteors. 1900’s shower had been a dud just like 1899’s. [15]
I will close this
historical summary with an account of one other American’s enterprising and intrepid
effort to report on 1901’s Leonid shower.
Dorothea Klumpke-Roberts (1861-1942) was born in San Francisco but moved
with her family to Paris, France where she earned a Doctor of Science degree
for a mathematical study of Saturn’s rings. [16] She became such a renowned
scientific contributor in Paris that a local aeronautical club offered her a
unique observational platform from which to view the Leonids: the car of their lighter-than-air
balloon. She was given last minute
pointers about meteoric observation methods by the Meudon Observatory’s
director just before the balloon ascended at midnight on November 15,
1901. She had been alerted by an
astronomer colleague who viewed the Leonids the night before that she was not
to expect a great number of Leonids and in fact she only recorded eight Leonids
seen between 1:20 and 5:10 a.m. on the 16th. However the few that appeared were dramatic
members of the meteoric species. She
wrote that they “were generally brilliant, showing an undulating, iridescent
trail, varying in brightness and changing from blue to green, then to
red.” Because the Leonid activity was so
sparse and because the moon was nearly full, she had ample time between meteors
to survey the landscape and landmarks 500 meters (1600 feet) below. Toward dawn
the aeronaut-pilot began a descent. Her
adventure ended safely on a French meadow when the pilot finally “threw out the
anchor with one hand and with the other opened the great valve” allowing gas to
escape the balloon. “We felt a slight jolt
as the car touched the Earth,” Klumpke-Roberts reported. [17]
A tradition was inaugurated
The preceding sketches
amply illustrate the energy and determination that American women have devoted
to meteoric study, in particular to investigating reoccurrences of meteor
showers. They began a tradition in
observational astronomy that succeeding generations continued to practice and
still do today.
Copyright 2017 Richard
Taibi
References
[1] Newton, H.A.,
American Journal of Science, Series 2, Volume 43, p. 78.
[2] Newton, H.A.,
American Journal of Science, Series 2, Volume 47, p.118.
[3] Newton, H.A., American
Journal of Science, Series 2, Volume 45, p.78
[4] Kirkwood, D., The
August Meteors, Sidereal Messenger, Volume 1,
1882, p.141-2.
[5] Kirkwood, D., A
Large Meteor, Sidereal Messenger, Volume 2, 1883, pp. 8-11.
[6] Bardwell, E.M., A
Star Shower, Sidereal Messenger, Volume 5, 1885, p. 29.
[7] O’Halloran, R., The
Meteors of the 13th of November, Popular Astronomy,
Volume 3, 1895, p. 213. See her biography earlier in this blog.
[8] O’Halloran, R., The
Leonids, Popular Astronomy, Volume 4, 1897, p. 453
[9] O’Halloran, R., The
Leonids, Popular Astronomy, Volume 6, 1898, p. 51
[10] Bardwell, E.M.,
Leonid Meteors Observed at Mt. Holyoke College Observatory, Popular Astronomy, Volume
7, 1899, p. 49-50
[11] Payne, W.W., The
Failure of the Leonids in 1899, Popular Astronomy, Volume 8, 1900, p.15
[12] Young, A.S. and
Lester, E.C., Observations of Leonids at Mt. Holyoke College, South Hadley,
Mass. Popular Astronomy, Volume 7, 1899,
p. 532
[13] Moulton, M.E., The
Leonids in India, Popular Astronomy, Volume 8, 1900, pp. 104-105.
[14] Howe, H.A.,
Leonids at University Park, Colorado, Popular Astronomy, Volume 8, 1900, pp.
21-24
[15] Editor, Leonids at
Vassar College, Popular Astronomy, Volume 8, 1900, p. 566
[16] Bracher, K.,
Klumpke-Roberts, Dorothea, in Hockey, T., et al., Eds., Biographical
Encyclopedia of Astronomy, Volume 1, New York: Springer, 2007, p. 646.
[17] Mrs. Dorothy
Klumpke-Roberts Observed the Leonids from a Balloon, Popular Astronomy, Volume 11, 1903, pp. 220-222.
