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In the early hours of November 17, 1966, a small group of amateur astronomers stood on Kitt Peak in Arizona, watching the sky. As the night went on, the number of meteors kept climbing. Then it exploded.<\/p>\n
At the peak, they estimated meteors were streaking across the sky at around 40 per second. It was one of the greatest meteor storms ever recorded. Sixty years later, on the night of November 17, the same meteor shower returns, though this time with a much quieter display.<\/p>\n
The Leonids happen every November, when Earth passes through a stream of dust left behind by Comet 55P\/Tempel-Tuttle. As those tiny particles, most no bigger than a grain of sand, hit our atmosphere at about 44 miles per second, they burn up and create streaks of light.<\/p>\n
The shower gets its name from the constellation Leo, the Lion. If you trace the meteors\u2019 paths backward, they all seem to come from a point in Leo called the radiant.<\/p>\n
Comet Tempel-Tuttle orbits the Sun every 33 years. When it passes close by, it leaves fresh, dense trails of dust. If Earth plows through one of those trails, the usual trickle of meteors can turn into a storm.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what happened in 1966. Observers in the western United States reported rates rising from a few dozen an hour to thousands per minute in a short burst. The group at Kitt Peak estimated the peak at about 40 meteors per second at 4:54 a.m. local time, equal to about 144,000 meteors an hour. The most intense part lasted only around 15 minutes.<\/p>\n