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(meteorobs) What? A Leonid storm in *1886*?!?
Here is a challenge for both meteor historians and dust trail theorists:
In the current issue of the journal Nature (issue of 23 March 2000 p. 345)
a short article is quoted from the issue of 22 March 1900 - in which a reader
described a meteor storm on November 15, 1886, that he had observed from
Shanghai. What other than the Leonids could have been responsible for that?
The writer (no name is given) called the phenomenon he saw at 3 a.m. "the
most brilliant pyrotechnic display I have ever seen. The meteors were
flying in every direction from the radiant point in numbers past all
calculation." The writer then described his astonishment that the meteor
storm he had witnessed was not noticed anywhere else nor mentioned in
the literature in the years since.
An outburst, let alone a major storm, from the Leonids in the year 1886
is not mentioned in the tables of two major review papers of historical
activity (Yeomans, Icarus Vol. 47, 494 [1981], and Mason, J.B.A.A. Vol. 105,
230 [1995]), and Gary Kronk in his comprehensive Leonid internet pages -
http://medicine.wustldot edu/~kronkg/leonidhis.html - explicitly states that
the years from 1870 to 1897 "were notable only due to a fairly consistent
rate ranging from 10 to 15 Leonids per hour."
So - what do we do with the 'new' report? Is it genuine at all? Was it the
Leonids that our Anonymous saw (I don't have access to the original
issue of the 1900 Nature yet to check whether the name is given there)?
And if there was indeed a Leonid storm in 1886, HOW WAS THAT POSSIBLE?
It was some 20 years after the last apparition of the comet and some
13 years before the next: Why would there be any siginificant dust
trail near Earth at that time? Or could it have been a resonant dust cloud
or some other dynamical phenomenon affecting Tempel-Tuttle's dust...?
Questions asked by Daniel Fischer - and who answers...?
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