Threatening the world with famine, plague and war;
To princes, death; to kingdoms, many curses;
To all estates, inevitable losses;
To herdsmen, rot; to plowmen, hapless seasons;
To sailors, storms; to cities, civil treasons.
Comets appeared to be marvelous objects, as well as sinister, chiefly because they bid apparent defiance to all law. Kepler had shown that the moon and the planets travel in regular paths—slightly elliptical to be sure, but nevertheless unvarying. None of the comets were known to follow regular paths till the time of Halley late in the seventeenth century, when, as we have before told, a fine comet made its appearance, and Halley calculated its orbit with much precision. Comparing this with the orbits of comets that had previously been seen, he found its path about the sun practically identical with that of at least two comets previously observed in 1531 and 1607.
So Halley ventured to think all these comets were one and the same body, and that it traveled round the sun in a long ellipse in a period of about seventy-five or seventy-six years. We have seen how his prediction of its return in 1758 was verified in every particular. On the comet's return in 1910, Crowell and Crommelin of Greenwich made a thorough mathematical investigation of the orbit, indicating that the year 1986 will witness its next return to the sun.
There is a class of astronomers known as comet-hunters, and they pass hours upon hours of clear, sparkling, moonless nights in search for comets. They are equipped with a peculiar sort of telescope called a comet-seeker, which has an object glass usually about four or five inches in diameter, and a relatively short length of focus, so that a larger field of view may be included. Regions near the poles of the heavens are perhaps the most fruitful fields for search, and thence toward the sun till its light renders the sky too bright for the finding of such a faint object as a new comet usually is at the time of discovery. Generally when first seen it resembles a small circular patch of faint luminous cloud.
When a suspect is found, the first thing to do is to observe its position accurately with relation to the surrounding stars. Then, if on the next occasion when it is seen the object has moved, the chances are that it is a comet; and a few days' observation will provide material from which the path of the comet in space can be calculated. By comparing this with the complete lists of comets, now about 700 in number, it is possible to tell whether the comet is a new one, or an old one returning. The total number of comets in the heavens must be very great, and thousands are doubtless passing continually undetected, because their light is wholly overpowered by that of the sun. Of those that are known, perhaps one in twelve develops into a naked-eye comet, and in some years six or seven will be discovered. With sufficiently powerful telescopes, there are as a rule not many weeks in the year when no comet is visible. Brilliant naked-eye comets are, however, infrequent.
Comets, except Halley's, generally bear the name of their discoverer, as Donati (1858), and Pons-Brooks (1893). Pons was a very active discoverer of comets in France early in the nineteenth century: he was a doorkeeper at the observatory of Marseilles, and his name is now more famous in astronomy than that of Thulis, then the director of the Observatory, who taught and encouraged him. Messier was another very successful discoverer of comets in France, and in America we have had many: Swift, Brooks, and Barnard the most successful.