1860 Great Meteor

The 1860 Great Meteor procession occurred on July 20, 1860. It was a unique meteoric phenomenon reported from locations across the United States. American landscape painter Frederic Church saw and painted a spectacular string of fireball meteors cross the Catskill evening sky, an extremely rare Earth-grazing meteor procession. It is believed that this was the event referred to in the poem Year of Meteors, 1859-60, by Walt Whitman. 150 years later in 2010 it was determined to be an Earth-grazing meteor procession.