1833 Meteor Storm Started Citizen Science

The science of shooting stars owes much to a storied episode of crowdsourcing, a new historical report shows, kicked off by a stunning 1833 meteor shower.

Astronomers have increasingly turned to 'citizen science' in the Internet era, setting up everyday folks to look for everything from alien worlds to the Milky Way's galactic gas bubbles. But in a new Endeavour journal report, Mark Littmann and Todd Suomela of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville show that there is nothing new about the practice, with one Yale astronomer pioneering crowdsourced astronomy well over a century ago.