Walt Whitman : Meteor Mystery Solved

The long-standing mystery over exactly what famed poet Walt Whitman saw streaking though the sky 150 ago has apparently been solved by a team of bookworm astronomers.
Following a trail that began with a 19th century painting and led to hundreds of newspaper reports, the researchers discovered that the "strange huge meteor-procession" mentioned in Whitman's noted collection "Leaves of Grass" indeed refers to a rare procession of earth-gazing meteors that occurred in 1860.
Meteor processions are so rare most people have never heard of them," said Texas State University physics professor Donald Olson, who worked on the investigation. There was one in 1783 and a Canadian fireball procession in 1913. Those were all the meteor processions we knew of."
This painting by Frederic Church showing a meteor was a crucial clue in solving the mystery of what poet walt Withman saw in 1860 and later wrote about in "Leaves of Grass."
Earth-grazing meteors enter the atmosphere at low angle, from the point of view of a given skywatcher, and appear to shoot slowly and dramatically along the horizon. They're much different than meteors appearing overhead and shooting swiftly toward the horizon .
For years , Whitman's description had been alternately attributed to several events, including: The 1833 Leonid meteor shower, the 1858 Leonid meteor shower and a famous 1859 fireball.
But the timeframe of the poem, which is title "Year of the Meteor," listed under "1859-1860," and includes a definite reference to the Great Comet of 1860," conflicted with the 1833 sighting.
Olson and his team dscribe their astronomical investigation in the July 2010 edition of "Sky & Telecope" magazine. "A really cool part is that the catskill newspaper describes it as dividing into two parts with scintillations, exactly like the painting," said co-researcher Ava G. Pope, an Honors Program at Texas State University who contributed to the project.
My spin: Happy star grazing...you never know what you may see, if you are really lucky , you may just see an alien ship landing. [GIGGLES]