00:00 On this day in space.
00:03 On November 27, 1885, an astronomer made the first known photograph of a meteor.
00:09 The picture was taken by Austro-Hungarian astronomer Ladislaus Wajnek.
00:13 He captured the trail of the meteor on a photographic plate from the Prague Observatory in the Czech Republic.
00:19 The meteor he captured was part of the Andromedid meteor shower.
00:22 The Andromedids were associated with Bela's comet, which broke apart in the 1850s.
00:27 When Wajnek observed the meteor shower in 1885, it was in the middle of a meteor storm.
00:32 This means that there were way more meteors than usual.
00:35 Sky watchers could see thousands of meteors per hour.
00:39 What used to be a spectacular annual meteor shower is now hardly even visible.
00:43 Instead of photographic plates or digital cameras, astronomers now have to use special tracking equipment to record images of Andromedid meteors.
00:50 And that's what happened on this day in space.
00:54 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
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