Walt Whitman Meteor Mystery Solved by Astronomer Sleuths

Very cool little story that also involves a Frederic Church painting and newspaper archives.

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-grazing meteors that occurred in 1860.–AOL News