C / 1874 H1 (Coggia)
| C / 1874 H1 (Coggia) [i] | |
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Drawings of the Comet Coggia
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| Properties of the orbit ( animation ) | |
| Orbit type | long-period |
| Numerical eccentricity | 0.9988 |
| Perihelion | 0.676 AU |
| Aphelion | 1144.7 AU |
| Major semi-axis | 572.7 AU |
| Sidereal period | ~ 13700 a |
| Inclination of the orbit plane | 66.3 ° |
| Perihelion | July 9, 1874 |
| Orbital velocity in the perihelion | 51.2 km / s |
| history | |
| Explorer | Jérôme-Eugène Coggia |
| Date of discovery | April 17, 1874 |
| Older name | 1874 III, 1874c |
| Source: Unless otherwise stated, the data comes from JPL Small-Body Database Browser . Please also note the note on comet articles . | |
C / 1874 H1 (Coggia) was a comet that could be seen with the naked eye in 1874 . Due to its extraordinary brightness, it is counted among the " Great Comets ".
Discovery and observation
The astronomer Jérôme-Eugène Coggia discovered this comet with his telescope on April 17, 1874 in Marseille . During the remainder of April and May, the comet was closely observed, including a. by Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke in Strasbourg , Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel in Arcetri , Lipót Schulhof in Vienna , George Rümker in Hamburg and Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt in Athens , but initially he remained a weak telescopic object and only moved slowly in the sky since he was still far from its proximity to the sun and earth . From mid-May the development of a tail could be determined.
From the beginning of June the comet was also observed with the naked eye, by the end of the month the brightness had reached about 4 mag. At the beginning of July the tail was already 6 ° in length , it grew rapidly and reached over 45 ° on July 16, it was perfectly straight and narrow and at the end only 1 to 2 ° wide.
In the second half of July, the comet was moving rapidly south as it passed Earth, making it more difficult to observe at dusk. Lengths of over 60 ° have been reported for the tail. On July 20, the comet passed the sun only a good 2 ° when viewed from Earth and was seen by Schmidt on July 23 as the last observer in the northern hemisphere .
On July 27, the comet was seen for the first time by observers in the southern hemisphere in the morning sky , namely in South Africa and by Robert Ellery in Australia . Even John Tebbutt observed the comet in Windsor (New South Wales) from August 1 to October 7. The last observation was made by John Macon Thome in Cordoba (Argentina) on October 19th.
The comet reached a magnitude of 0 to 1 mag on July 13th .
Scientific evaluation
With this comet, numerous spectroscopic images of a large comet were obtained for the first time from May to July 1874 by William Huggins , Angelo Secchi , Joseph Norman Lockyer , Georges Rayet and Charles Wolf.Only one continuum was initially determined, and the three typical ones from mid-June Comet ribbons. The polarization of the comet was also examined and detected in the tail and coma from the beginning of July .
Parabolic orbits were first calculated for the comet, and after more observation data were available, an elliptical orbit through the schoolyard was first calculated .
Orbit
Finally, in 1882, Josef von Hepperger was able to determine an elliptical orbit for the comet from 638 observation data over a period of 185 days , which is inclined by around 66 ° to the ecliptic . At the point of the orbit closest to the sun ( perihelion ), which the comet traversed on July 9, 1874, it was located just 101.1 million km from the sun, just within the range of the orbit of Venus . On July 23, it reached the closest approach to earth with 0.29 AU / 43.5 million km .
The comet moves in an extremely elongated elliptical orbit around the sun. According to the orbital elements , which are afflicted with a certain degree of uncertainty, it could have had an orbital period in the order of 5500 years before its last passage through the inner solar system in 1874 . After that, however, its orbital eccentricity had increased by about 0.001 and the semi-major axis increased significantly from about 315 AU to about 550 AU, so that its orbital time more than doubled. It will probably not return to the inner solar system for more than twelve thousand years.
The comet in literature
The British lyric poet of the Victorian era Gerard Manley Hopkins describes the comet in his diary entry of July 13, 1874:
“The comet - I have seen it at bedtime in the west, with head to the ground, white, a soft well-shaped tail, not big: I felt a certain awe and instress, a feeling of strangeness, flight (it hangs like a shuttlecock at the height, before it falls), and of threatening. "
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ A b G. W. Kronk: Cometography - A Catalog of Comets. Volume 2: 1800-1899 . Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-521-58505-8 , pp. 405-412.
- ^ Donald K. Yeomans: NASA JPL Solar System Dynamics: Great Comets in History. Retrieved June 17, 2014 .
- ^ Peter Grego: Blazing a Ghostly Trail: ISON and Great Comets of the Past and Future . Springer, Cham 2013, ISBN 978-3-319-01774-7 , pp. 118-119.
- ↑ C / 1874 H1 (Coggia) in the Small-Body Database of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (English).
- ↑ SOLEX 11.0 A. Vitagliano. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on September 18, 2015 ; accessed on May 2, 2014 .
- ^ David H. Levy: Poet and Observer: Gerard Manley Hopkins and some mid-19th Century Comets. In: Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada . Vol. 75, no. 3, 1981, pp. 139-150 ( bibcode : 1981JRASC..75..139L ).