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Frederic Church was a 19th-century American landscape painter. In the Catskills in 1860 he painted a breathtaking string of fireball meteors in an Earth-grazing meteor procession. This was probably the event referred to in Walt Whitman's poem “Year of Meteors”.

An Earth-grazing meteor occurs when a meteor's trajectory takes it through the atmosphere and back out into space, not hitting the ground. A meteor procession is a very rare sight. It happens when a meteor breaks up as it enters the atmosphere, creating multiple meteors in nearly identical paths.

Meteor of 1860