C / 1830 F1 (Great Comet)
| C / 1830 F1 (Great Comet) [i] | |
|---|---|
| Properties of the orbit ( animation ) | |
| Orbit type | parabolic |
| Numerical eccentricity | 1.0 |
| Perihelion | 0.921 AU |
| Inclination of the orbit plane | 21.3 ° |
| Perihelion | April 9, 1830 |
| Orbital velocity in the perihelion | 43.9 km / s |
| history | |
| Explorer | Henry Antoine Faraguet |
| Date of discovery | March 16, 1830 |
| Older name | 1830 I. |
| Source: Unless otherwise stated, the data comes from JPL Small-Body Database Browser . Please also note the note on comet articles . | |
C / 1830 F1 (Great Comet) was a comet that could be seen with the naked eye in 1830 . Due to its brightness, some count it among the " great comets ".
Discovery and observation
Henry Antoine Faraguet, naval officer and teacher of physics and chemistry at the Royal College Port Louis in Mauritius , discovered this comet not far from the south celestial pole on March 16, 1830. When he wanted to repeat his observation the next day, the comet was already 5 ° behind North moves. His discovery has long been attributed to Professor d'Abbadie of the same school, but the latter had only given the information to the Royal Society .
In the following nights there were several more independent discoveries from several ships. Mary Ann Fallows, wife and assistant to the royal astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope , was one of the first women to discover a comet in South Africa . At the time of its discovery, the comet could only be observed from the southern hemisphere , had a brightness of about 3 mag and a tail length of 7–8 °, but it quickly became brighter as it approached Earth until March 26th. After that, its brightness decreased again, but there was another independent discovery on Ascension on March 29th .
The comet was first observed in the northern hemisphere in the second half of April when Jean-Félix Adolphe Gambart discovered it in Marseille . The astronomers in Europe were informed quickly and the comet could be observed by Joseph Nicolas Nicollet in Paris , Karl Ludwig Harding in Göttingen and Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers in Bremen until the end of April . The tail was still 2.5 ° in length. At the beginning of May the brightness was still 4 mag, but it fell below the visibility threshold for the naked eye by the end of the month. Until August, the comet could still be followed with telescopes under increasingly difficult visibility conditions; the last observation was finally made on August 17th.
The comet reached a maximum brightness of about 2 mag.
Orbit
The first calculations of the comet's orbit were published by Olbers as early as 1830. In 1873, from around 300 observations over a period of 147 days, only a parabolic orbit with limited precision could be determined for the comet , which is inclined by around 21 ° to the ecliptic . It thus runs in a path that is only slightly inclined to the plane of the ecliptic . At the point of the orbit closest to the sun ( perihelion ), which the comet passed on April 9, 1830, it was located at a distance of about 137.8 million km from the sun in the area between the orbits of Venus and Earth . As early as March 26th, it had reached an unusually close proximity to Earth at a distance of around 0.15 AU / 22.0 million km. This close proximity to the earth was also the reason for its observed brightness. On April 8, the comet passed Venus at a distance of 34.3 million km , and finally on June 2 it passed Mars at a distance of 87.1 million km.
When the comet appeared in 1830, the gravitational pull of the planets reduced the eccentricity of its orbit by about 0.0013. Due to the uncertain initial data, however, it cannot be deduced with certainty whether the comet is definitely moving on an elliptical orbit. It is unlikely to return to the inner solar system , or will return many tens or hundreds of thousands of years later .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Geneanet. Retrieved July 22, 2015 .
- ↑ CD Laney: SAAO - History of the South African Astronomical Observatory. Retrieved July 23, 2015 .
- ↑ GW Kronk: Cometography - A Catalog of Comets, Volume 2. 1800-1899 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-521-58505-8 , pp. 92-95.
- ^ John E. Bortle: International Comet Quarterly - The Bright-Comet Chronicles. Retrieved July 22, 2015 .
- ↑ C / 1830 F1 (Great Comet) in the Small-Body Database of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (English).
- ↑ SOLEX 11.0 A. Vitagliano. Archived from the original on September 18, 2015 ; accessed on May 2, 2014 .