There are two ways to find history in the stars this week: First, in the position of the red planet Mars; and second, in the Leonid Meteor Shower, which rains down overhead from now until the end of the month.
So let’s first consider Mars, which is moving through the region of Sagittarius stars. Sagittarius looks like a large teapot, tipped up on its side and pouring into the Milky Way. On Tuesday, Mars, which is visible to the naked eye, will appear very close to the dwarf planet Pluto, which is only visible through high-powered telescopes. In the world of myth, Mars is regarded as the god of war, and Pluto is god of the underworld. When these two come together in the Sagittarius region, we can expect a “tempest in the teapot”.
In the history of America, this saying referred to the outbreak of American colonists against the tax on tea in 1773, a defining moment in relations between the British government and its colonists, which later escalated into the American Revolution.
The second bit of history in the stars at this time accents the end of the American Civil War, with the discovery of Comet Temple-Tuttle as the source of the popular Leonid Meteor Shower in 1866. The Leonids were famous throughout the 19th century because this meteor shower was among the most spectacular, with unprecedented estimates of over 100,000 meteors per hour.
The showers were predominantly visible in North America, east of the Rockies, and were regarded by nearly every group that recorded them as a message from God regarding the state of affairs in 19th century America. It wasn’t until the end of the American Civil War that the shower was discovered to result from Earth’s passage through the trail of stuff left by Comet Temple-Tuttle.
You can find Mars in the southwest about an hour after sunset this week, and the Leonid meteors, which strike Earth’s atmosphere nearly head on, are visible overhead when the constellation Leo arcs up over the horizon in the East, after midnight.