Nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman wrote of "the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads" in one of his poems in
Leaves of Grass. It's a striking image. Yet decades later no one was sure what event inspired it, though it was the subject of some scholarly debate.
The mystery was finally solved several years ago by a team of "celestial sleuths" from Texas. They also discovered that the artist
Frederick Church had painted the meteor procession that night.
