On the night of November 12 to 13, 1833, observers across North America watched up to 100,000 or more meteors per hour tear silently across the sky. This episode explores the Leonids, the annual meteor shower born from comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, and explains why its retrograde orbit produces head-on collisions at 70 kilometers per second, the fastest of any annual shower, turning a half-gram pebble into a meteor as bright as the brightest star.

The hosts break down why some years bring a gentle shower and others a storm, how young dense dust ribbons differ from diffuse older trails, and how Jupiter's gravity plus the Poynting-Robertson and Yarkovsky effects reshape those trails over time. They revisit the cultural shock of 1833, from the Lakota winter count and a Cheyenne peace treaty to accounts by Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Joseph  ...