‘They thought it was judgment day’: The night in 1833 when ‘stars fell’ on the southern US November 1833. As the night skies exploded and the stars fell on America’s Deep South, the slavers on one plantation in Tennessee – terrified of the end of the world – attempted to make restitution to those they had enslaved. Every year, in mid-November, the Earth passes through the Leonids, a huge meteor cloud left behind by the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Each year sees…